[ Previous entries: 2016 … 2017 … 2018 … 2019 … 2020 … 2021 … 2022 … 2023 … 2024]

With 2651 Steam hours at the end of 2024 and 2738 Steam hours at the end of 2025, I logged only a paltry 87 total hours into Steam this year, and a few of those were in They Are Billions, until I cut that off again.

2025 Steam replay report is here.

281 achievements achieved for the calendar year.

One highlight was getting a new, simple, Atari-style joystick for playing Vampire Survivors and similar games.

Vampire Survivors with Simple Joystick

1. They Are Billions: For the first few months of the year, this is the only game I got around to playing, usually just playing the weekly community challenge. I cut it off eventually, and realized I managed to call it quits at exactly 1200 hours. We’ll see if I can stay clean. (Year-end check-in: I stayed clean!)
2. AtmaSphere: The first new game I finally got to play in 2025, in late April. This was a Steam freebie sometime in April, supporting the release of its sequel. It’s hard to go wrong with a Marble Madness-alike, in which a perfect sphere somehow propels itself under its own power to navigate narrow obstacle courses and collect stuff. To be fair, it’s also sort of a bowling game, as you get achievements for knocking objects off of precarious platforms, as well as elements of Donkey Kong (dodging barrels rolling downhill), Frogger (disjoint platforms in motion), and Pinball (as a bunch of spinning blades knock you around). Very chill music, even if the action can make you tense at times.
3. Transformers: Galactic Trials: This was in a pack of licensed games in a Humble Bundle and it’s the only licensee that really caught my eye. As an old school fan of the original 1980s 1/2 hour toy commercials and associated toys, it can be frustrating to deal with the fact that they have been adding more lore to the universe throughout all the intervening decades via various reboots and reimaginings (though I did enjoy Transformers One last year). The “Trials” qualifier on this game’s title clues me in that it’s some manner of racing game (still trying to figure out when that word became connected to racing). The game monkeyed with the monitor rez (always gotta mention it because I hate that so much since I have to fix windows afterward) and I couldn’t access the game’s settings until after I finished the tutorial race. Just as I was getting used to the racing action, the game switches up the gameplay to a 3rd person combat affair, and then it alternates between those modes. So, it’s way a more complicated and fast-paced action game than I am used to. At least I got 2 achievements, 1 for completing the tutorial, and 1 for losing the first real trial I attempted.
4. Puzzle Plunder: Steam freebie, hard to go wrong with a match-3. I’ve played many like it and this one doesn’t quite measure up to the best that I’ve sampled. No animation when you swap pieces to make a match, just an instant swap. Can’t drag the piece to make a swap. If you click on one piece and then abandon that swap to click another spot on the board, it won’t let you– instead, you have to right-click to cancel the swap. The music was pleasant and chill, though. However, it didn’t scream “Caribbean/pirate”-type music like I might expect from this title. I didn’t stick around long enough to gain a broader understanding of the story and goals surrounding the core match-3 gameplay (I can’t abide when such simple games try to have a lot of story).
5. Thief of Thieves: Great aesthetic, aping the style of a comic book, which the game is based on. Reminds me of a Telltale choose your own adventure-type of game, otherwise.
6. Syder Reloaded: I have a fair amount of playtime in the original Syder Arcade. They announced this new version of the game 5 years ago and it finally dropped. They offered Arcade owners a major discount so I took the plunge. I’m mostly looking for differences vs. the original. But it’s still fun to replay through the game and fetch a whole new set of achievements. After going back and viewing some footage of the old game (I captured and posted some 4K/60 fps footage of a few levels on YouTube), I can see that a major improvement is in UI scaling.
7. CrapShoot: A very inexpensive shmup game that I picked up on the same day as Syder Reloaded. It’s a relatively simple bullet hell shmup that I couldn’t get far in. It only has 4 achievements and I fortunately got one of them for just starting the game.
8. Unlock The King: I continue to be impressed with the different variations of zen puzzler games people can produce based on the game of chess. This one is based on moving around chess pieces (mostly knights, since they have the most unusual movement rule, but rooks and bishops are often sprinkled in) until your queen has a path that she can follow to murder the opposing king. Why the other pieces aren’t allowed to move in for the kill is unclear. True to form for a puzzler, it starts relatively simple with little to none in the way of instruction (none in this case) and ramps up very quickly. I got to level 18 (out of 100) before I literally couldn’t see a way to move any pieces. At least I got an achievement (it appears this has progression-based achievements, i.e., 1 per 10 levels). The game also inspired me to create a “Chess Puzzler” category in my Steam library, which is presently 4 strong.
9. Brain Break: I picked up a bunch of block-pushing games during a block-pushing-themed sale event on Steam in April and started working through them. This zen puzzler ramped up difficulty very quickly, but I fortunately cleared it off both the SteamDB and SteamHunters sites quickly. Thanks for giving an achievement with every level.
10. Mad Age & This Guy: Continuing with the block pushers, this game doesn’t necessarily have block-pushing as a core element. It’s still a charming overhead perspective game about a guy navigating mazes and needing to strategically shove things around while also planting bombs to destroy people, including hostile automatons. It can be frustrating to effectively take out robots using bombs, though. You don’t have to, but you also don’t get the highest score without doing so.
11. Golf Peaks: Yet another zen puzzler, this one based on golf with some not entirely accurate physics. I’m really settling into a groove with these zen puzzlers. Just sort of play them for awhile until I get stuck, and hopefully I have earned at least 1 achievement, and then I can write it up here and move on, having cleared the game off my various lists.
12. Sizeable: Another zen puzzler, and a rather inscrutable one, based around growing and shrinking items in an environment. It reminds me of Machinika Museum and A Little To The Left, both games that just push you into the deep end and say, “figure it out!” with minimal clues.
13. Shatter: This has to be the most intense Breakout/Arkanoid block-breaking clone I’ve ever played. Quite fun.
14. Star Wars Pinball (Amazon Luna): When I previously played this on the Amazon Luna streaming service, it was a wonky experience. It worked a lot better when it came up as a freebie again this month. The difference is likely down to playing with a wired game controller plugged into a desktop computer with wired ethernet networking, vs. a wireless Bluetooth game controller communicating with an Amazon FireTV stick which itself was connected to the internet via wifi. The latency was essentially non-existent and the experience was much more pleasant.
15. Final Vendetta: Picked this up in a Humble Bundle of brawler video games. It looked to be an homage to the classic Final Fight game and I was right on the money with that impression. This is firmly time-locked in 1990 with its arcade accurate graphics as well as its pitch perfect soundtrack. As always with these retro-influenced affairs, the gameplay is slightly improved from the classic arcade style.
16. Dead Island: Retro Revenge: My first exposure to the Dead Island franchise, and it’s obviously not like the rest of the series. I assumed that this was a side-scrolling brawler. It sort of is, but it’s also a constant runner, in that your character is in constant running motion and the gameplay consists of executing various attacks on 3 different planes. I suppose it’s a shmup, spiritually, though it reminds me most closely of the Turbo Tunnel (level 3) of the NES Battletoads (complete with obstacles to dodge). It also has a CRT filter as this is supposed to look like an old arcade game. My favorite sly detail was that the “Insert Credit” message is burned into the screen.
17. River City Girls: I’m usually repelled by anime schoolgirl stuff, but then I saw that this was A) made by WayForward, and B) was therefore heavy on the kind of polished retro nostalgia that I appreciate. This game obviously pays homage to the famous River City Ransom game for the NES, a game that I completed during a single rental period at the height of NES-mania (albeit with the help of Nintendo Power). I didn’t find RCR especially interesting or challenging at the time, but it clearly found its way into many players’ hearts. I like the charm of this game just fine, and how it elevates the gameplay over what the NES was capable of. The anime schoolgirl banter gets obnoxious in a hurry, though.
18. Pocket Mini Golf 2: This came from a publisher named Qubic, during a sale of many of their games, many of which were very cheap. They definitely have a “type” as ascertained by scrolling through their various screenshots. Very bright and cartoonish visuals. This was a simple time-waster that was good for playing while listening to audiobooks.
19. Pocket Mini Golf: I went back to purchase the original game after enjoying the sequel enough. The original isn’t as good as the sequel. Apparently, it started life as an IAP-enabled mobile app and its heritage shows. You accumulate jewels as you play and if you mess up, you spend jewels to continue or skip levels. Presumably, in the original mobile edition, you had the option to pay real money to do the same. I got a few achievements and I was out.
20. Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy: I’ve heard a lot about the Crash Bandicoot franchise and the lore surrounding its history and development, like how it was an early mascot for the fledgling PlayStation brand and pushed the cutting-edge hardware platform to its limits. I have had this remastered collection on my Steam wishlist since it first went on sale in 2018. During the Steam Summer Sale, it finally fell below the magic $5 “insta-buy” threshold. It’s really sharp and fun. The gameplay strikes me as something that would be right at home on the original PlayStation’s hardware. I compare the game’s graphics against screenshots via MobyGames and it once again makes me glad that I missed the early 3D age of gaming. I suppose this game carries on the crate legacy of that groundbreaking era.
21. Patrick’s Parabox: Here we go– what a unique block-pushing puzzle. I took to this right away. Its gameplay is centered around pushing around blocks, but the twist is that blocks can be pushed into other blocks, then they get squeezed into smaller forms, as can the player. It’s keeps the block puzzle formula fresh.
22. Penny’s Big Breakaway: Bright, colorful, fast-paced action game acquired through a Humble Bundle. It seems to take a page out of the Sonic the Hedgehog playbook of being visually cartoonish and frenetic.
23. Kingdom Rush Vengeance: I was bingeing on some audiobooks during the summer and I wanted to play some video game at the same time, a game that was NOT They Are Billions. I decided to boot up this fourth installment. It had been almost 5 years since I played it. I remember enjoying it well enough even though I apparently only played it for 6 total hours (I played the original game for 100 hours).
24. Caribbean Crashers: Sort of a toy “physics” game that was a Steam freebie, in which you use your pirate ship to sink increasingly larger opposing pirate ships by firing a limited quantity of cannonballs. That it was free is the most positive thing I can say about it. I put the “physics” in quotes because I initially thought it was a physics puzzler in the same spirit as Angry Birds. But the physics are entirely too wonky to fairly hold the classification. The game has 15 levels and I cleared every single one of them on the first try, so I completed the entire game in just under 1/2 hour. If the game had any achievements, I’m certain I would have collected them all. I once heard of a concept called “first order optimal strategies”, which is something you want to avoid in your game design. Unfortunately, it’s easy to see that FOO strategy– knock out the base of the ship and the rest comes crashing down.
25. Golf Club Nostalgia: This seems to fit neatly into the “zen puzzler” category, but with a dystopian edge. Revisit the ruins of earth and play golf on the wreckage, while listening to a fascinating radio broadcast about the downfall.
26. MainFrames: I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this based on the promotional materials, other than that it used retro computer iconography. It turns out to be a platformer, or what I like to call an “impossible platformer” (I hear that “precision platformers” is more the term of art these days). Whatever it’s called, the game is doing its job correctly when it’s making my palms feel sweaty and my stomach feel dread as I’m about to execute a double wall jump over a deadly abyss. This feeling is further exacerbated by the general glitchiness of the graphics — part of the game’s aesthetic — but which adds to my anxiety since I have years of experience in which those kinds of glitches indicated that something was very wrong with the machine you were presently working on, and that machine was soon to either hard-lock or reboot itself.
27. Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander (Lightspeed Edition): Another attempt to get into a 4X game. This one feels more approachable thanks to its highly pixelated graphics. However, the tutorial/prologue kept dragging me through all the intricate steps to play the game, and that always bores me.
28. ANNO: Mutationem: This is such a visual and atmospheric treat. Easy to play and absorbing as you just walk around and try to figure out the world and the story that it’s trying to tell. Things really ramped up when I got to the combat sections and adapted to the smooth rhythm.
29. Hotshot Racing: I dusted off this enjoyable racing game for a play session after realizing I probably hadn’t seen all the courses yet, which is the most fun part of the game. I think I was trying to play it in a much more systematic manner the first time. This time, I was just sightseeing, catching all the billboards for other video games, and noticing how the game liked using as decoration a semi-tractor truck that is identical to Optimus Prime’s vehicle mode.
30. Ridge Racer Unbounded: What a weird little game. I’ve had this in my Steam library for a long time, probably because it cost a dollar somewhere along the line. I see from Steam that it comes from 2012. Will it play fine? Actually, it runs amazingly well and looks gorgeous at full 4K. It seems a bit different from what I know of the mainline Ridge Racer games, which I’m led to believe focus on pure racing. This is… different. Set in a notNYC locale called Shatter City, it seems to tell the story of pointedly non-conformist rebels who are gonna bring down the system, man, by… recklessly racing cars through city streets? And destroying a bunch of buildings and other stuff, and presumably putting a lot of ordinary people’s lives in danger (although the streets in the game are devoid of people). Then I thought about that publication date of 2012 and realized that this is a product of the Great Recession/Occupy Wall Street Zeitgeist of the period. Looks fantastic, though. The most obnoxious part is waiting for the menu screen to timeout in its attempt to connect to the multiplayer server, but the game remains perfectly playable as a single player.
31. The Mummy Demastered (Amazon Luna), (Steam link): I hadn’t checked in on Amazon’s Luna game streaming service for awhile. I saw this game in September and knew nothing about it, but then I saw that it’s by WayForward. I see a game by WayForward, I play. Based on the 2017 Tom Cruise movie, it’s basically a spooky 16-bit Castlevania game but with a well-armed and armored special forces super soldier as the protaganist. The title later went on sale during the Steam Halloween sale where I promptly purchased it (thanks again to Amazon for the game trialing service!).
32. LEGO The Lord of the Rings: Out of the seemingly hundreds of licensed LEGO video games out there, I have really only played a bit of the original Star Wars trilogy via the Gamecube. But I have collected a fair number of the titles. I decided to give this one a whirl on a slow Saturday. It just sort of marches you through the story beats of the franchise upon which it is based, with some sight gags thrown in, usually something slapstick-y involving some character being clumsy. While it’s absolutely beautiful at 4K, I had to go through the screen-switching agony to get there, as it reset my monitor to 1080p and then initially played the game at 1280×720 in a borderless window in the upper left quadrant of my screen. I managed to score an achievement, for finishing the prologue. Curiously, only about 75% of players receive this, indicating that 25% of players don’t even last through the intro level. It also occurred to me that, for being based around a toy designed for building stuff, a major component of these games is destroying stuff.
33. Spacebase Startopia: I wanted to try getting into a new simulation game and picked this one out. It always seems to boil down to whether I can tolerate completing the tutorial or not. In this case, not. It was notable that my aging RTX 2070 couldn’t keep up with the game at 4K and full graphical settings, but then, this game was published about 3 years after my card hit the market.
34. Race For The Galaxy: After the disappointment of trying to figure out both Halcyon 6 and Spacebase Startopia, I decided I would try this space-based game that has a slightly different emphasis– deck building! I don’t know what I was thinking. I really do think I have a weird mental deficiency which makes me cognitively unable to understand any game that involves cards. I have never understood Poker. The most complex card game I ever played was Uno, and I have completely forgotten how to play that. Then in the 1990s, games like Magic: The Gathering came on the scene and video games that extended the same concept to the digital realm eventually followed. And they just don’t make any sense to me. I tried to play the tutorial in this game and it was all like, “put this card over here and press ‘OK’, then throw away this card because the last card negates some bonus or another and press ‘OK’…” It’s something that I wager would make more sense to people who are already versed in the genre, sort of like how I can jump into most any tower defense game with zero handholding. Okay, rant over. I bailed out pretty quickly and saw that I had only logged 3 minutes. So I took a deep breath and jumped back in for a few more minutes, if only to push it over that precious 5-minute mark so that it clears off of my SteamDB record.
35. Devolver Bootleg: A charming title that pays homage to computer floppy discs containing multiple knock-offs of more well-known games. Games were simpler back in the day and were easier to knock off. I don’t recognize all the games here but I’m having an inordinate amount of fun with them.
36. The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia: Hard to believe that there are still games that revolve around typing. But this game sure is fun, even if the gameplay look is a bit limited. Dodge bullet hell (apropos for this religiously-themed game) while trying to type out prayers to invoke holy bullets against the possessed.
37. Vampire Survivors: I picked up playing this game again after a year specifically so I could experiment with playing it using a classic Atari-style joystick. When I first started playing the game years ago, it occurred to me that it might be possible to play with such a simple controller and I turned out to be right. And then I got back into the game for hours and hours, right before Halloween, which I suppose is apropos. It always seems that there are dozens of characters left to unlock and at least a hundred achievements I have yet to earn.
38. Warhammer 40,000: Shootas, Blood & Teef: Picked up in a Humble Bundle of Warhammer 40K video game titles. Normally, I don’t really understand this universe, but this looked pretty straightforward. Indeed, it’s straightforward in its storytelling and characterization of the orcs as moronic brutes who are highly effective fighters. It’s also a visual feast as it looks like a comic book come to life as a side scroller. A heavy metal fan would appreciate the soundtrack as well. Even though the storytelling was simple, the controls took some getting used to. I’ve never been able to get used to twin stick shooters. There are so many different actions on this game and no button goes unused. It’s lucky they have an easy mode.
39. Brotato: I have a lot of fun with Vampire Survivors and I heard that Brotato is the same type of game, the growing genre of Vampire Survivors-alikes. At one point this year, I fired it up and tried and round but must not have been in the mood, because Steam said I had played for an entire minute, while also earning an achievement for dying once. After I got the retro joystick and got back into Vampire Survivors, I tried this again and started getting into it. It’s visually simpler while also being more visually complex– low res graphics, but they showcase every single weapon you are equipped with. Suddenly, I wonder if this game was influenced by Mr. Potatohead in any way. The retro joystick works great on this as well.
40. Deadly Premonition: The Director’s Cut: I’m curious to know what was in the original version vs. the Director’s Cut? Perhaps a working game? This game bugged out extremely hard for me. The part that did work (the opening cinematic) was excessively goofy. It also betrayed what appeared to be PS2-era roots with the juddery longer distance texture rendering. I was surprised to learn that it was released halfway through the PS3/XB360 era in 2010. The parts of the game that I was able to see all painted this as very much an homage to Twin Peaks. I had this set aside specifically for Halloween season, but it’s unplayable, as many of the Steam reviews confirm.
41. Through The Woods: My pick for after-trick-or-treating this year on Halloween. I was extremely tired and only powered through the intro of this ostensibly spooky walking simulator on October 31 proper. I did earn an achievement for doing so, though. Curiously (as was the case with LEGO LoTR), it seems that 40% of the players got too bored to even get that far into the game. I tried playing the game again a few days later and found it too dull to continue.
42. Death Fungeon: A precision platformer (what I like to call, “impossible platformer”) that was a freebie. Way more fun than Through the Woods. Precision required, but not necessarily impossible in the way that genre entries typically are.
43. CRYPTARK: This was in the Roguelike category adjacent to Brotato and it caught my eye that way. Explore and salvage old spaceships. It’s not without it’s charm, even if it’s another twin stick affair that I have trouble with.
44. The Land of Pain: A pretty hiking simulator, at least in the beginning, that I cleared off my Spooky category a short while after the Halloween season. I didn’t get to the creepy parts.
45. OneShift: A puzzle game with the twist of that you can freeze time and shift through different configurations of obstacles to navigate. A freebie that hands out achievements like candy, so I cleared it off of both lists (SteamDB and Steamhunters)..
46. Everwarder: When I arrived at my yearly Thanksgiving Tower Defense (TowerGiving? ThanksTDGiving? still workshopping the event name), I didn’t have too many unplayed games in the overflowing category. But this one promised to have TD elements. I marched through the tutorial as best I could, but it just didn’t grab me. The low-fidelity pixelated graphics unfortunately make the various elements of the game hard to distinguish and I maintain that a key requirement for TD games is to be able to easily differentiate among various enemies and towers. Thankfully, the game tosses out an achievement for merely starting the game.
47. G.I. Joe: Wrath of Cobra: A delightful little romp that throws back to the days of the 16-bit arcade action brawler games. It has spot-on graphics, hits all the main characters, but also features an original song for the opening. This leads me to assume there are some licensing issues regarding the original theme song. I managed to play it for an hour, making it to stage 4 with Snake Eyes, but the gameplay got too repetitive.
48. Crush the Castle Legacy Collection: Extremely simple game about launching projectiles via trebuchet at castles to murder the inhabitants. Very simplistic, not a great deal of strategy, still a fun time-waster.
49. Luna & Monsters Tower Defense -The deprived magical kingdom-: Another TD game that I’ve had hanging around for a long time, and which I finally forced myself to clear off the backlog during TD-Thanksgiving. It strikes me as a fairly simplistic clone of the my beloved Kingdom Rush TD franchise with very wonky English. Also, it feels like it started life as a mobile game (then again, so did Kingdom Rush), but I can find no evidence to support that. I got my playtime and achievements and that’s good enough.
50. Monument Valley 2: I played the original game many times on both iOS and Android devices. When I saw the sequel was cheap on Steam (apparently because #3 was just released), it was an easy purchase.
51. Crush Link TD: At the tail end of ThanksTowerGiving, I tried out this TD title. This is more like it! This gets back to the bare bones of TD, the way I’m used to, but with a fascinating theme and visual aesthetic of fighting nasty maladies of the internet.
52. Oriental Dynasty: Silk Road Defense War: I was gifted this game on Steam, from someone who knows I’m into this type of game (tower defense). It looked like a straight-up Chinese knockoff of my favorite long-running tower defense franchise, the Kingdom Rush series. This turns out to be the correct observation. I didn’t have much trouble playing with it, even though it starts up in Chinese. The interface is simple enough that I navigated to the options and changed the language, because I at least know what “Chinese” looks like in Chinese and manipulated that selection box. When I got into the game, I found what appeared to be a re-skin of a Kingdom Rush game. This was good because the English translation is so wonky that I probably would have been a bit lost. But everything is a 1-to-1 mapping from a basic Kingdom Rush game. This makes me wonder if both games were based off the same underlying engine plugin for Unity. I saw at least 1 Steam review that referred to the game (perhaps derisively, perhaps affectionately, perhaps a bit of both) as “Qingdom Rush”.

Going forward, I have a few humps/mental blocks I’m trying to get over, including these general categories of games that generally frighten me away:

• Card games
• Deck-building games
• 4X games
• Idle games

[ Previous entries: 2016 … 2017 … 2018 … 2019 … 2020 … 2021 … 2022 … 2023]

Wow, I’ve really been dragging my feet on this yearly recap– start of April and I’m just getting around to firming up the notes and hitting publish. I haven’t gotten to play any new games for 2025 because every time I think about it, I remember I still have this outstanding task.

I started off 2024 by attempting to play more games on my old Chromebook reformatted years ago for Linux, with a relatively weak CPU and integrated GPU. I have an impressive number of Steam games that support the platform. I later used another small form factor Linux computer. Very simple and slick gaming experience.

This is also the year that I fell off the wagon and started playing They Are Billions once more. However, the real highlight is this odd FMV-based game called Immortality. Doughlings: Arcade was also a major highlight, the kind of game that starts affecting your vision after playing it too long, as you still see ghosts of the game’s motion everywhere you look.

Stats:

• 2651 Steam hours by the end of 2024, minus 2420 by the end of 2023, so 231 hours in Steam. More than 70% of that came from Billions.
• Steam Replay Report
• SteamDB stats
• Steam Hunters: 2058 total achievements by the end, 193 in 2024, which is 3 more than my Steam Replay Report above indicates, since they seem to generate that report a few days in advance of the end of the year.

The Games:

1. Vampire Survivors: Started the year off strong by sinking a bit of time into a session of my top game from last year. Every time I start it up, I need to scrub through the achievement list in order to find a specific goal for playing in this round. And then they dropped new Konami-oriented DLC in the spring (which I later realized corresponded with a new Contra title). I didn’t play that one too much but I absolutely played the next DLC that came out last year, based on Konami’s Castlevania franchise. This was a brilliant crossover since V.S. obviously apes the Castlevania style so brazenly.
2. Cosmic Express: The first game I attempted to play via Steam on my Linux laptop (low-power, reformatted Chromebook). The gameplay reminds me of Freshly Frosted. It’s in a category I could fairly label “Zen Puzzler” as it has a cartoonish art style featuring a pleasant, soft color palette and relaxing music, while tutorializing without a single spoken or written word– such is the simplicity of the game play. I always have 2 modes of thinking for a game like this: 1) This game sure is trivial; this feels kindergarten-level; 2) Wow! The difficulty sure ramped up quickly. I played for about an hour on my first attempt and played through branching levels until I hit dead ends on all of them. Still hunting for an achievement.
3. Flowing Lights: I initially classified this as a racing game under my Steam categories, assuming that is was some intense space racing action. Incorrect, it’s more of a puzzle game as you have to figure out how to defeat enemies in each section by avoiding their firing patterns and also using nearby gravity anomalies. It also adapts for 4K fullscreen on first launch, which is a minor thing I greatly appreciate. The chill music almost puts it into the “zen puzzler” category, except that it’s a bit more memorable as it reminds me of old school MOD tracker music.
4. Dear Esther: Landmark Edition: I’m pretty sure I picked this up as a freebie on Steam some time back. I suspected it was some manner of adventure game. The game is set on an island and starts at a stone walk up into an abandoned house. I turned around and started walking into the water and earned my first achievement after less than a minute of gameplay, for drowning. At least I can scratch this off the achievement hunt straight away. It seems to be a walking simulator, but a darn pretty one, that has no problems at full 4K resolution on my aging desktop. Every so often, an unseen narrator cuts in and reads another letter to his Esther. Really, it feels like a simulator of hiking up a mountain during blustery weather while listening to a particularly slow-moving audiobook. I eventually made my own goals for myself, like discovering the source of the mountain stream on this island. I also wandered by the narrow trail alongside the stream was delineated with a barbed wire barrier. Seems unnecessary. I eventually saw the game through to the end as it’s mostly a guided tour, and thus, only a matter of time until you finish.
5. Divide By Sheep: This is an odd little puzzler that I’ve had in my collection for awhile. Typically, when I look at the Steam Store trailer or screenshots for a puzzle game, I can pretty well figure out what the game is all about. Not so with this game. Every time I have watched the trailer video for this game, it made zero sense. Once I played it, the pieces started to fall into place. Broadly, it has to do with saving sheep, but not all of them. You have to use various facilities available to sacrifice a certain number of sheep (and sometimes wolves) so that just the right number of sheep (or wolves) is saved.
6. Lara Croft GO: I started getting back into this great puzzle game when I realized there were still who chapters I hadn’t played yet.
7. Road To Ballhalla: Charming zen puzzler where you roll a ball around a course avoiding all manner of dangers. It didn’t really grab me but I played it just long enough to clear it off of both SteamDB (5 minutes of playtime) and SteamHunters (1 achievement).
8. Inertial Drift: Twilight Rivals Edition (Amazon Luna): Very good-looking racing game that I assume is supposed to ape the style of Initial D, a game I’ve seen in arcades a few times.
9. DeathComing: I tried to get back into this death-oriented puzzle game but it was slowgoing.
10. They Are Billions: After 2.5 years of staying clean, I reached a point where I realized that this is the only game I really wanted to play. Much to my shame, I reinstalled it and sunk 22 hours into it before I realized I had had enough… at least those were my notes earlier in the year. However, I still managed to play about 160 hours throughout the year.
11. Destroy All Humans!: Remaster of an older game that I picked up in a Humble Bundle. I have always been enamored with the campy 1950’s sci-fi aesthetic and this game absolutely delivers.
12. A Little To The Left: A novel puzzle game I picked up in a Humble Bundle. It’s always refreshing to see a unique art style in a game. The puzzles are quite varied and diverse and give you very few clues on how you’re supposed to tidy up or organize the components. There’s a puzzle about organizing 8-bit NES cartridges. I got stuck on a calendar level after 20 minutes and still hadn’t scored any achievements. Fortunately, there is an achievement for taking a hint in the in-game hint system.
13. Roundguard: Fascinating twist on the Peggle/Pachinko formula, tranforming it into a fantasy RPG hack & slash dungeon crawler thing. I got into it for a bit, harvesting achievements.
14. Doughlings: Arcade: A great little Breakout/Arkanoid-inspired game that absorbed me for about 2 hours the first time I started it up as I was listening to some audio material. It hits the right notes in the soundtrack and also in the game design, constantly ramping up the challenge and also the player’s abilities. Then I played it for 5 more hours the following day which resulted in being unable to read text on a screen without hallucinating fragments of the text falling. By now, I’ve mostly finished the game and earned many of the achievements.
15. Doughlings: Invasion: I enjoyed the Breakout-style Doughings: Arcade so much that I was eager to jump into Doughlings: Invasion, which turns out to be a Space Invaders clone. This didn’t do anything for me. I didn’t even care to hang around long enough to earn an achievement.
16. Wanted: Dead: At one point, I had been splurging on various bundles. I picked this one up in a bundle about female protaganists. Apparently from people who were responsible for the 3D Ninja Gaiden games, which piqued my curiosity. I selected it as a game to unwind with and enjoy when my birthday rolled around. It’s pretty intense and the kind of action game I know I’ll never master, but it’s still fun to dip my toe in. At least it has an achievement progression which allowed me to grab a few before my initial play session came to a close.
17. Duck Souls: This puzzle platformer came up for cheap and I mostly bought it on the strength of its name alone. Very brutal difficulty, what I classify as an “impossible platformer”. Still fun to play.
18. Flower: Art house game that gives you no guidance and just plops you in to figure it out. I failed to figure it out. Blow a flower petal around a field and then power up by collecting more petals? It felt like a 3DMark graphical demo with limited interactivity.
19. Death’s Gambit: Afterlife: I picked this up in a pack of Metroidvania games on Humble Bundle. I played it a little bit and was impressed by how it laid out the various character classes for you at the beginning of the game.
20. Mighty Switch Force! Collection: Mighty Switch Force! (Amazon Luna): One of the May freebies on Amazon Luna and it looked pretty cute. Then I saw it was by WayForward, a developer I adore from many of their past works. It’s sort of a puzzle-platformer and I jumped right into the first of the 4 games bundled and immediately cottoned to the gameplay. True to form, I used Amazon Luna as a trial service and prompty wishlisted the game on Steam. WayForward just does everything right with their games, from the graphics/aesthetic to the music to the gameplay.
21. XCOM: Enemy Within: I suddenly got an itch to play this old game, one of my top played games, again after leaving it alone for 6 years. It didn’t run at first but I visited the Steam forums and found a bunch of people having the same problem, roughly a month after Steam records that I last played the game. Turns out that choosing the Steam option to verify file integrity does the trick for fixing it. I gave it a few hours of gameplay on a new game before getting bored. Maybe it will inspire me to move onto other turn-based games. At the very least, I could audition XCOM 2 or XCOM Chimera Squad, both of which I have owned forever. While Enemy Within is still fun, the 2012-era graphics are starting to feel a bit dated.
22. Machinika Museum: A freebie sometime during the past year. Novel, casual puzzle game that tosses you in and just says, “figure it out!” So you figure out what various mechanical artifacts are for.
23. Duke of Alpha Centauri: Cheap acquisition during the Steam Summer Sale. It’s a cozy little shmup game. No problem getting an achievement here– it’s the type of game that has a crazy number of achievements. In fact, I scored 24 of them just from 7 minutes of playtime through the tutorial and the first level. The graphics are surprisingly taxing on my video card, but at least it knows how to go fullscreen at 4K on first boot. The music is great as well.
24. Cube Runner: This comes from the same studio as Duke of Alpha Centauri and it really shows in the music. It’s another of those impossible platformers, the kind that are greatly frustrating but inexplicably hook you. And the designers came up with some platforming mechanics I never would have thought of. Lots of progression-based achievements in this one as well.
25. Tomato Jones: I picked this up just based on the clever name and the cartoonish graphics. It turns out to be a platformer (perhaps of the “impossible platformer” sub-genre). It reminds me somewhat of Marble Madness in only because you have to carefully control a sphere through treacherous terrain. I’m fascinated that the game was authored in Python using the pygame library.
26. Islands of Insight: This has to be the most breathtakingly beautiful block puzzle game I have ever experienced. Also the most computationally intensive. I’ve long lamented that there seems to be little reason to own powerful gaming GPUs if you don’t care about FPS games (as I don’t), since those tend to be the titles that actually take full advantage of such hardware. It’s refreshing to see another game type that can really flex the hardware. This was a freebie on Steam circa June, it took awhile to download and possibly longer to boot up the first time– it’s a good thing I’m always eyeing performance via Windows Task Manager via a separate monitor, so I knew that the game was still doing something on first boot (like using more GB of RAM than I have ever seen used on my 32 GB system before, and also using all of my RTX 2070’s 8 GB of VRAM). But in the end, it was worth it for a brief romp through this world. You wander around, exploring the beautiful terrain, and occasionally solve a puzzle in order to advance. The game promises 10k puzzles. Not sure if that’s true. It’s also an MMO game and presumably, there is some feature to solve puzzles collaboratively.
27. The Ascent: I’ve had my eye on this game since it first came out and it went on sale for cheap enough this year that I took the plunge. It’s rather spectacular, graphically, and surprisingly not stressful at all on my GPU, even at 4K/max settings (consistently less than 5% on my RTX 2070). Turns out that all those hyper-detailed, multi-layered locales which are elaborately illuminated in real time actually don’t take that much computing muscle. The cyberpunk-inspired setting really makes me want to explore the constructed world in a way no fantasy setting ever entices me. I suppose it’s sort of a fantasy dungeon-crawl-type game, just transposed onto a sci-fi setting.
28. Gods Will Be Watching: I’m really not sure what to make of this narrative-driven point and click adventure. Perhaps the most curious thing about this pixelated game is that it uses slightly more GPU muscle than The Ascent.
29. Chorus: A pretty space combat game where the character seems to have some kind of force-like powers for controlling her ship.
30. Overcooked (Amazon Luna): A charming little cooking-themed time management game that I tried via Amazon’s Luna streaming service. I grasped the concept pretty quickly but was ready to move on just as quickly.
31. Mahjong Epic (iPad): Booted this up on my iPad and got sucked in for a few hours, again.
32. A Dark Room (Android): In the middle of the year, I became curious about the concept of an “idle game” (a.k.a. an incremental game). I researched the exemplars of the genre and this was the first recommendation I tried. This sets the tone for idle games in that you are really thrust into the situation.
33. Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance TD: Curiously, I had just been contemplating that I never bother paying more than about $5 for a game. Unless it’s for a new entry in a series that I really enjoy. And then the fifth installment of Kingdom Rush dropped (actually for a slight launch discount) and I went straight to work. It’s impressive that the series continues to evolve its formula. This installment allows you to swap out different types of towers and also field 2 separate hero units at once.
34. Blazing Chrome: A pitch-perfect homage to SNES-style run & gun games (really nailing the “Mode 7” graphics), most obviously influenced by Contra III: Alien Wars, though mostly on the camp side, and it’s Terminator robots rather than aliens as the enemy. It’s also just as brutally difficult as the games it’s based on.
35. Lake: The best summation I can think of for the game simply entitled “Lake” is a cozy Hallmark movie transformed into a video game. It’s also a 1986 period piece. An MIT-educated engineer working hard at a software company producing DOS-based productivity software, and takes a vacation to her hometown, the sleepy lake-encircling Oregon town referenced in the title. Her parents are apparently vacationing in Florida, and she… takes over her father’s US Postal Service route, which is generally not how these things work, but whatever. This and a few other clues in the decor (like a sign for “Cola Cerveza”, which translates to “Cola Beer”) clued me in that this might be a non-American outfit doing the developing. This turns out to be the case (dev house is Dutch). Still, it’s really darn pretty, even if the graphics aren’t especially detailed. They really put my RTX 2070 to work in the 4K resolution, and the texture pop-in during some of the opening scenes is appalling. But still pretty overall. Also, while you drive a mail truck, you can’t go GTA mode. The vehicle is stopped cold by buildings, cars, and people.
36. Tropico 6: I tried this Caribbean Island city builder game a few years ago but the tutorial bored me too much, as tutorials often do. I got the full game along with a pile of DLC through a Humble Bundle and went to work again, bolstered by my experience with Banished last year. It works a lot better if I just jump in with both feet and see what I can possibly figure out.
37. VVVVVV: Older game that I picked up in a Humble Bundle recently. I think I played it on mobile well over a decade ago, which of course is the worst way to play any platformer (with touchscreen controls). It falls into the category of “precision platformer” (what I can “impossible platformer”). Fun to play in short bursts, like the other such genre entries in my collection. The wildest part was on first boot when it announced that it was compiling Vulkan shaders– humorous because I associate that with more complex graphics than are on offer here. No strike against it since it’s still fun.
38. Hacknet: I have numerous “hacking” games in my Steam collection, but this might be the first time I have actually played one of them. It’s a crazy experience– I have a lot of knowledge when it comes to computers, programming, Unix-like environments, and how hacking is performed, and this game presents a simplified, scaled-down view of all these elements. Sort of like how American Truck Simulator is not built anywhere close to full scale (where — and I know from experience — a trip that ought to take at least 4 hours only takes 20 minutes in the game). But it can be difficult to turn off one’s brain for long enough to really engage with the experience, rather than try to map everything in the game onto real world counterparts. It’s probably the same feeling a real chemist gets when trying to play SpaceChem (a game I quite enjoy, but I’m no chemist). I got my first achievement in short order, for figuring out how to short circuit the tutorial, thus finishing it faster than par– all because I was just experimenting with the interface in a “hmm, I wonder what happens if I do this?” manner. Truly in keeping with the hacker spirit.
39. Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown: This was my first exposure to the Ace Combat franchise. I only played briefly because I just can’t get the hang of flying simulators. Just sort of spinning around and around.
40. GYLT: Continuing my tradition of playing a new game on Halloween night after passing out candy, I scrubbed through my unplayed list, seeking a game with at least a minimal spooky factor. Based on its screenshot, this looked like it fit the bill. I was not wrong. It sort of feels like a PG-13-rated H.P. Lovecraft adventure. Creepy monsters, but not too horrifying. It’s fair to say I love the atmosphere on this one. It’s well put together and kept me interested.
41. Tetraminos: Also gave this a whirl on Halloween night. A gussied up variation of Tetris with a few more pieces thrown in. The background graphics can be way too distracting.
42. Diplomacy Is Not An Option: For the first time since Halloween night, I finally got a chance to give a new game a whirl. It was during the American Thanksgiving holiday time, which is when I have my ad-hoc tradition of scrubbing through my tower defense collection. There was an entire Humble Bundle earlier this year which consisted entirely of TD games, so now is the prime time to actually try some. This game must be appreciated for its unique, simplistic (yet still GPU-taxing) visual style. Rather than simple tower defense, this actually looks to be a strong replacement for my beloved They Are Billions game with the need to maintain an entire serfdom in order to fund the defense.
43. IMMORTALITY: This is a strange game indeed. But strange can be good. The gameplay revolves around reviewing video footage of an actress in order to figure out… something about her. I found it quite engrossing even if I don’t quite understand what the objective of the game is. It’s also the first game I have ever encountered with “Content Warning” on the main menu of options. Lots of things, including “Murder: asphyxia, knife, and firearm.” I read that and immediately thought, “Whoa! Spoiler warning much?!” I once attended a presentation from famed film critic Roger Ebert who explained that Pulp Fiction replicated the experience of watching a movie in bits and pieces over the course of a few weeks, viewed from the retail counter of a busy video rental shop. This makes sense when you realize that the film’s director, Quentin Tarantino, worked at such an establishment. And thus it is with IMMORTALITY: It’s the experience of watching, not one, but three very different movies in short clips, out of order, and trying to piece together what the movies are about, while also trying to decipher something broader, possibly supernatural, connecting the movies. I think one reason that I find the game fascinating is that I have passing interest in “behind the scenes” material demonstrating how stuff gets made, stuff such as movies, and this game is comprised mostly of that type of material. Some scenes are the actual finished scenes from the movies, some are table reads, some are screen tests or dress rehearsals.
44. Isle of Arrows: Tried this for my yearly Thanksgiving tower defense romp. It promises to be a sort of minimalist zen TD game. It didn’t grab me in any appreciable way, and I have other TD games to get to.
45. Element TD 2: Another one from the Humble Bundle TD bundle that I got to try over Thanksgiving. More graphically impressive than Isle of Arrows and moving music.. But ultimately, I couldn’t find what made it special and moved on pretty quickly.
46. Crysis Remastered: I’m normally not one for FPS games, but this Crysis series looked cool and was part of a Humble Bundle later in the year. It also allows you to play it a super-duper high-tech power armor that frankly seems to give numerous unfair advantages vs. your opponents, like stealth. It was still difficult for me, but I kept pushing through because it did a good job of engrossing me in the story.
47. Pluviophile: I stayed in for New Years Eve and fired up the They Are Billions weekly Community Challenge, which I bombed relatively early. With 45 minutes left in the year, I decided to take the plunge for 1 new game to count toward the calendar year of 2024. Pluviophile (which is a person who likes rain) is a pretty walking simulator, reminding me of the Dear Esther walking sim which I played very early in the year. Also a good complement to Crysis: Remastered, which I largely enjoy as a beautiful walking simulator, albeit one broken up by bouts of extreme violence.

There! Now that I’ve finally written this up, I can allow myself to play some games for calendar year 2025.

[ Previous entries: 2016 … 2017 … 2018 … 2019 … 2020 … 2021 … 2022 ]

Round-up time! I definitely got more gaming done this year vs last. Whereas, I only got 38 hours logged into Steam games last year (while delving into various other platforms like Amazon Luna, Epic, Apple Arcade, and Google Play), I got my Steam hours up this year. SteamDB profile indicates that I finished at 2420 hours, minus 2300 hours (ending point for 2022), equals 120 hours on Steam. I dipped into Amazon Luna occasionally, but rarely stayed due to the streaming latency. And the record below shows I didn’t game at all on Epic, Android, iOS, or many other platforms.

I think my Steam Replay Report from 2023 is slightly more interesting than the one from 2022. 256 achievements, and those were mostly deliberate, though some were holdovers from previous years. They didn’t click until I booted up the game again this year. This was motivated by a new achievement hunt after I learned of the site called Steam Hunters which provides a whole new way to look at your Steam gaming.

Vampire Survivors dominated (and I think that will continue well into the future) and accounted for exactly half of the achievements earned. Then there was Banished, which I only meant to enter into briefly in order to gain an achievement, but ended up staying for 15 hours before the achievement showed up — and enjoyed every minute.

1. Vampire Survivors: I’ve heard a lot of positive buzz around this, but few more details beyond the heavily populated albeit pixelated screenshots. It sort of dumps you in and leaves you to figure it out. I wasn’t impressed at first (possibly because my computer was in a laggy state when I first played it), but after a reboot, it started to click. Before I knew it, I had sunk a dozen hours into it in a weekend, finally reaching the cartoonishly chaotic endgame state for a given level. Then I just kept on playing and playing, and suddenly it was February and realized I had only played this game. New updates and DLCs would be rolled out throughout the year and I would quickly sink my teeth into those as well. This game is the main reason I got any significant playtime this year as well as a load of achievements.
2. Metal Slug: A month and a half into the year, I’m finally getting around to playing some game that is not Vampire Survivors. Many Metal Slug games came up for cheap in an SNK sale in February, so it seemed like a good opportunity to fill in that gap in my gaming history. I dropped $2 on the original version. These were always mainstays in the arcades I frequented in the late 80s/early 90s, but I never dropped a token in. I absolutely see the charm in the detailed visuals.
3. Astral Traveler: This reminded me a bit of S.T.U.N. Runner. But it didn’t grab me at all, as I only sunk a few minutes into it and quickly moved on. I later rediscovered it while scrubbing through my games for an achievement hunt and didn’t remember playing it at all earlier in the year, such was the impact that it made. Even the motivation of collecting a single achievement didn’t help me understand what I was supposed to be doing in this game.
4. Yakuza Kiwami (Amazon Luna): The first Luna game I have tried this year (I didn’t even bother with any of the January freebies). I had to visit the Wikipedia page in advance of playing just to see how confused I would be, jumping into a random point in the series. Fortunately, this is a remake of the original entry in the franchise. I actually greatly enjoyed myself and this made me long for the opportunity to really be able to sit down and immerse myself in an open world crime game.
5. Spec Ops: The Line: Morally complex military shooter game from a decade ago that was on sale for cheap enough. It grabbed me pretty quick with its amazing set pieces and I put a few hours into it. I wanted to continue as far as I could into the story, but one of the game play segments got to be too much for me and I ended up putting the game away and just watching the cut scenes edited together on YouTube.
6. Mega Man 11 (Amazon Luna): Freebie on Luna that I really wanted to enjoy. Couldn’t get through one level and I meant to visit other levels before the month was out, just to see the creativity on display. But alas.
7. Slayaway Camp: Another game that I played for free on a different service that I then proceeded to purchase on good old Steam. What can I say? I just can’t get into mobile/handheld gaming, but I love whiling away some time on a good puzzle game with clever aesthetics (in this case, 80s slasher horror flicks).
8. Resident Evil 4: Chainsaw Demo: I was eager to try the demo of this remake to see just how amazing the graphics could be. I didn’t last long here. Indeed, it reminds me of my attempts to play other remakes in the series.
9. StarCraft (Remastered): Time to get back to the roots using this title. I didn’t put much time in, though.
10. Steel Assault: This came up for sale on Steam. I was eager to play it again after demoing it on Amazon Luna last year. Again, probably not the usage model that Amazon had in mind for the Luna service, i.e., “try on Luna before you give you money to Steam”. I feel like it’s more playable on Steam, perhaps due to no possibility of network latency.
11. Yakuza Kiwami 2 (Amazon Luna): I enjoyed the first Yakuza Kiwami game on Luna. I was unsure whether I would be able to follow this game, not having finished the first one. Fortunately, it had a lot of “would you like to learn more about this?” segments as you amble around the opening of the game, which fill you in on the various story pieces you may have missed from the previous installment. This is the kind off game that makes me wish I had the time to indulge in open world time sinks.
12. Resident Evil 2 Remake (Amazon Luna): Another Luna freebie that I had to try before its free month expired. Very fun to revisit this one with its vastly upgraded visuals. I particularly respect how they maintained the mid-90s aesthetics with the technology (payphones, CRT computer monitors, fax machines). When I played the game, however, the game’s landing page on the Luna site illustrated why one shouldn’t get too invested in this game streaming tech as the landing page announced that it was slated to leave streaming soon. Ultimately, I didn’t play very long because I find these games are really quite brutally difficult.
13. Endzone: A World Apart (Amazon Luna): An Amazon Luna monthly freebie, a post-apocalyptic colony builder. I think the major twist here is that it requires a controller. These types of games are quite complex in the UI and ordinarily require a mouse and keyboard. I almost gave up a few times during the tutorial as I struggled to accomplish the goals laid out because I couldn’t figure out how to reach the required menu item in the UI.
14. SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech (Amazon Luna): This might be the first time I’ve suffered through even a little of a card-based video game (though I think my beloved Plants vs. Zombies had a sort of card mode). Also my first introduction to the SteamWorld franchise. I generally have never been able to comprehend random cards as a core gameplay mechanic in video games (at least games that aren’t simulating normal card games). I guess the graphics were pretty enough, with a sort of watercolor-influenced aesthetic.
15. Infectonator! Survivors: I rewatched Shaun of the Dead for the first time in like 15 years. It made me want to play this game again. Got sucked into it for a few nights.
16. Arcade Paradise (Amazon Luna): Seemed promising but turned into a massive disappointment. Basically, you work a menial job to earn money for the privilege of playing some arcade games. You have to do laundry in a laundromat, pick up trash around the same place, and… unclog the toilet. This is where I lost it, not because it was such an ugly chore, but I genuinely couldn’t get a grip on the control scheme and actually unclog the darn toilet. So I never did get to see what the arcade games were like. Reading online, though, it sounds like they were nothing special.
17. F-Zero (SNES Mini Retro): Always gotta take a few laps around the track from time to time, even if I’ve never gotten very far overall in the game.
18. Zen Chess: Mate in One: Simple chess puzzler that was on sale. Hard not to like, at least if you know the rules of chess, and much better than that weird chess puzzler I tried last year. The music has me wondering if there is a standard set of tunes for these simple zen puzzle games, because the soundtracks seem to run together in my mind.
19. Zuma Deluxe: I purchased this awhile back and saw it was still on my “Not Played Yet” Steam list, so I sunk a few minutes into it. I remember this being one of the earlier mobile games I played and enjoyed, circa 2010, before the dark times, when mobile games started to decline before outright sucking. Unfortunately, this desktop version suffers from a few problems: Can’t be full-screened, even though the option is there, thus it can be difficult to play without occasionally clicking out side the small-ish window; and the “mouse to rotate a wheel” core gameplay mechanic feels frustratingly inaccurate. I later figured out that the fullscreen option works if I disable hardware acceleration. So it’s possible to play in 4K, albeit at a stretched aspect ratio, and at the small cost to my sanity as it shifts video modes and screws up all my desktop windows.
20. Devil May Cry 5 (Amazon Luna): I was trying to get back into sampling Amazon Luna games, but the experience of trying out DMC5 was too punishing. Suddenly, the streaming just can’t keep up and I bailed a minute into the action. I still have the earlier DMC collection on Steam to work through, if I get the motivation.
21. Orbital Bullet (Amazon Luna): A game with a fascinating aesthetic, in which our hero runs around the perimeter of various small asteroids. Pretty, and sounded good, but it failed to hook me in any appreciable way.
22. CARRION: I have an ad-hoc tradition of playing some game on Halloween night after I shut down the house’s trick-or-treating operation. Often, it’s a scary-themed game. This year I chose CARRION, which I’ve had my eye on since it released about 3 years ago, and came up for sale just before Halloween. It’s exceptionally novel, you have to give it that much.
23. Ride 4 (Amazon Luna): This is the first time I have heard of the Ride franchise, which is apparently the 2-wheel version of realistic racing simulators such as Gran Turismo. It didn’t click, at all. First, the same streaming issues that plagued DMC5 a few days earlier cropped up here. Then, the game won’t allow you to cleanly exit unless you finish the tutorial window! Good thing the browser window can be axed.
24. Tiny Lands (Amazon Luna): This is an interesting idea: a video game in which you are tasked with finding the differences between 2 nearly identical images, like puzzles that used to appear in the newspaper. This is more advanced though, since the pictures are actually 3D rendered scenes which you need to rotate and zoom in order to discern the variations. It was a fun romp for a few minutes. I always found that the fifth and final difference was the hardest to find.
25. Peggle Nights: Enjoying Zuma Deluxe so much, I remembered that I hadn’t worked through this similar classic (by today’s standards) casual game that I had purchased on Steam some time ago.

Okay, quick break for a weird tangent here: I sometimes check into my profile on the SteamDB site, which can track your game library and playtime (if you set your Steam profile as public). It lists a certain number of games in my library as having been “played”. Around November, I learned of a separate site called Steam Hunters, which specializes in tracking achievements. When I checked my profile on this site, I noticed a gulf of about 100 games vs. SteamDB’s “played” count. It turns out that SteamDB counts a game has “played” if you have a total of 5 minutes of playtime, obviously a low bar. Meanwhile, Steam Hunters counts a game as “started” when you actually earn your first achievement in a game.

Thus, I set out on a meta-goal to narrow the gap between these 2 numbers.

26. Banished: The first game I noticed that has 5+ minutes (roughly 7) of total playtime on Steam, but no achievements earned yet was this colony simulation. I started it once, maybe twice before, but the tutorial bored me too much to continue. Tutorials often do that to me. Anyway, the way I wanted to work this achievement goal was to play until I organically earned my first achievement, so I went in with no knowledge of how to earn my first one. I read a brief guide from the Steam Community page regarding Banished that gave me some pointers as I delved into the game again this time, just bumbling around and figuring things out as I went. This reminds me of the way that I approached my beloved They Are Billions, figuring out new things every time I sat down to play, for like the first 50 hours. I restarted my colony a few times as I figured out more and more things. The general colony portion reminds me strongly of Exodus Borealis, a game I briefly fell in love with last year, particularly in the seasonal mechanics tied to the rapid life/death cycle. I finally scored my first achievement after about 14 hours– to think, I just wanted to get in and out with some achievement, but alas. Hey, at least I was having fun. After getting the achievement (for constructing one of each building type in my colony), I somewhat lost motivation to keep playing. My colony had reached an equilibrium at around 45 colonists. Reading some reviews of the game, it seems there are some wonky mechanics surrounding how effectively colonists can breed. If you don’t nail that correctly, your colony will never really get off the ground. Still, this experience makes me want to try my hand at some other more complex games by just poking around to see what I can figure out.
27. Chip’s Challenge 2: The second game I tried for my “try to get an achievement” challenge. This time, I only had to invest about 14 minutes rather than 14 hours in order to hit that first achievement in this classic block puzzler, by completing the first 5 levels.
28. Mega Man Legacy Collection: Mega Man 2: Looking for games that I’ve played but not scored any achievements on, I saw that there’s an achievement for finishing Mega Man 2 in this Mega Man collection. Mega Man 2 was my first exposure to the franchise and remains my favorite. I decided to cheat somewhat by looking up the optimal order for challenging the robot masters. But by the time I reached the third stage, I still got too frustrated/overcome with the realization that I should be doing something better with my time that I elected to move on. Strange to think that I completed this game in under 24 hours when I rented it as a kid.
29. NiGHTS Into Dreams: Next up on my achievement hunt… this just isn’t going great. I actually tried on this game, but I have no idea what’s going on and then the graphics made me feel ill after a few minutes. No harvesting from here. I had to go lay down while wondering what it would have been like to spend a bunch of cash in the mid-1990s for both a Sega Saturn and this game and then getting sick every time you tried to play it.
30. Pinball FX3: Next on the achievement hunt, I apparently played this game for 6 or 7 minutes previously. My notes from my previous play session showed that the game messed up my monitor resolution and also featured an extensive tutorial (on pinball). It also had an annoying voiceover for menu navigation. On this playthrough, the resolution was already correct, the game didn’t bother me with a tutorial, and I shut off the voiceover. I wondered how hard it would be to score an achievement, but I managed to grab 2 of them on just a single playthrough of the default board, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
31. QUBIC: I played this all the way back in 2018. I remember it being a novel little puzzle game that cost a dollar. But my notes indicated that the achievements were broken. So I decided to fire it back up and see if that functionality has been fixed sometime in the last 5 years, and maybe grab 1 or 2 of the 141 (!!) available achievements. Turns out all I needed to do is launch the game and I got 74 overdue achievements. It’s playing havoc on my Steam client while I’m writing these notes, giving me about 3 achievements every 10 seconds or so.
32. Sine Mora EX: I’ve wanted to revisit this shmup game ever since I sampled it in 2019, and my achievement hunt provided the impetus. I still have no idea what’s going on with the story, or who the factions are, but the visuals are absolutely stunning and it actually taxes my (somewhat aging) video card at full 4K in the process, same as it did 4 years ago. I exited the game after an hour to find that I did, in fact, earn an achievement.
33. Ball of Wonder: I was surprised to notice that I hadn’t scored any achievements on this despite feeling like I had played it a lot. It turns out I had only played it 4 hours, but it was a great time waster. I fired it up one more time and quickly received a few progress achievements (destroy X amount of Y-type blocks in this Arkanoid/Breakout clone).
34. Stars In Shadow: At long last, I did something in a 4X game. Motivated by my achievement hunt, and bolstered by success at figuring out how to play Banished, I decided to jump into this game and just poke around. Honestly, it’s very approachable, with a very cartoonish style and obvious aesthetic differences among the various races. And I even earned an achievement a few minutes in.
35. Zombo Buster Advance: Thanksgiving time! The time of year when I have an ad-hoc tradition of sinking into some tower defense game or another. I played Zombo Buster Rising a few years ago but was quickly annoyed with it because it felt like a mobile game that was ported to Steam, which turned out to be correct. This one is different and apparently has never visited a mobile platform. Advance has somewhat deeper gameplay than Rising, but not by much. It grabbed me long enough to score an achievement, then I went back to scrubbing through other unplayed TD games.
36. Planet TD: Another unplayed tower defense acquisition in my collection. It’s fairly uninspired. Neither the towers nor the enemies are particularly distinctive. I cleared the first 2 levels while struggling to remain awake. At least I scored 11/61 achievements so I don’t need to revisit for the achievement hunt.
37. FTL: Faster Than Light: The old roguelike indie darling that took me forever to warm up to. I hadn’t played it in forever and noticed that, despite playing it for well more than 13 hours, I had never scored even a single achievement. So I fired it up and immediately scored 2 achievements. I guess they were a relatively recent addition. Sure enough, seems that they didn’t arrive until January, 2020. I still went on to play it quite a bit in December.
38. Lumencraft: This is supposed to have some tower defense elements to it after awhile of digging and grinding up crystals. I might have to spend more time with it.
39. Gravity Island: This game is so challenging that I couldn’t even make it past the initial language selection screen. Or perhaps I was encountering some odd bug. Also forces a resolution change and messed up desktop windows, which is always a strike against a game.
40. Alien Shooter TD: I’m surprised that I missed this game during my annual Thanksgiving tower defense celebration, when I was scrubbing my library in search of unplayed TD games. Around Christmas, I got around to playing it. It didn’t impress me, especially since the graphics felt really primitive, as in early-era 3D graphics, even though this game dates to 2017. I should have guessed by the “TD” tacked onto the end of the title that “Alien Shooter” is the name of a franchise and that the earlier games actually do date back to the early 3D games. This TD game featured a game play innovation I hadn’t seen yet: The need to constantly purchase more ammo for your soldiers. I was about the abandon it before scoring an achievement, but then I crossed the threshold for a fairly basic one, so I won’t need to revisit this.
41. Girls Like Robots: Another revisit for the achievement. I really had to force myself to get through the first act. It just doesn’t grab me, but I got that precious achievement. What a chore.
42. Besiege: Apparently, I tried this briefly prior to this playthrough, but I couldn’t find any record of that fact among the pages of these yearly recaps. The achievement hunt gives me renewed motivation to figure it out. This is sort of a physics simulation and mechanical engineering workshop that allows you to create a siege vehicle that will destroy various medieval fortified positions. It’s sort of grabbing me this time around. I scored my first achievement pretty early on, but I hope to get back to it.
43. Bloodrayne Betrayal (Legacy): I haven’t visited this game in a long time (6+ years), but the achievement hunt marches on. I remember sampling this game a few times and enjoying it quite a bit, despite the miserable reviews, and the fact that I only had 26 minutes of playtime invested. I’m still enjoying it on this playthrough. However, I got stuck at one point. Then I decided to delve into what the achievements require exactly and they seem pretty advanced (no “baby’s first achievement” here). So this will likely remain a hole in the achievement hunt.
44. Bloodrayne Betrayal: Fresh Bites (Amazon Luna): The last game I played, also on the last day of the year. After playing the legacy version, I wanted to dip into this remaster/alternate artwork edition. It didn’t grab me, though, as the streaming latency still made the experience too arduous. I didn’t stick around long enough to appreciate the graphical differences.

So by the end of the year, I managed to narrow the game between SteamDB’s “played” games and Steam Hunters’ “started” games by at least a dozen.

[ Previous entries: 2016 … 2017 … 2018 … 2019 … 2020 ]

Steam hours currently = 2,262 hours, minus last year’s milestone of 1,934 hours, which means that (while crossing the 2k hour mark) I logged 328 hours in Steam gaming last year. So, my Steam gaming time continues to decline year over year. And I only have 34 games logged here. I guess I had other things going on this past year.

Over at MobyGames, I managed to accrue… wow, 38 whole points! This seemed strangely low to me until I recalled that I spent a huge amount of time actually approving contributions this year, as opposed to making contributions.

At the very least, I think I managed to finally kick my They Are Billions habit, a significant milestone. Speaking of which, it looks like that was the very first game I played last calendar year…

1. They Are Billions: I was managing my addiction by allowing myself to play the weekly community challenge. However, I would still slip into the mode of playing the survival game, mostly serving the role of something to do while listening to some manner of audio program. I came to the realization that when I play in these increasingly advanced survival modes, it’s essentially the equivalent of idly bouncing a rubber ball against the wall to keep my body doing something as I’m listening to said audio programs. However, in April, after 863 hours, I finally won a 350% game, something I didn’t think I would accomplish. At 965 hours in August, I won at 380% (score of 103,868 points). Sometime in the middle of September, I decided that I was already as good at the game as I ever care to become (vs. could possibly become), and finally hung it up. Strangely, I had managed to log exactly 1,000 hours into the game at the time I decided to quit. I have a feeling that I will never log as many hours into any other game. Or at least, maybe I’m just hoping that’s the case.
2. Two Dots (iOS): I got some mileage out of the previous Dots game on mobile platforms and I saw the sequel in the App Store. Free with IAP. Usually, I try to evaluate what the IAP on offer entails before installing the game. But I could not determine the purchase types for this title. So I gave it a whirl and got through a few levels before I failed to meet the goal after 8 or 9 levels… and I had to wait 20 minutes before trying again, or had the option to pay to give it another spin. I do believe this is the first time I have ever played a game that offered this scenario. Previously, I had only heard of it. Uninstalled the game immediately after encountering it.
3. Plants vs. Zombies 2 (iOS): Plants vs. Zombies on an original iPod Touch was my first introduction to the tower defense genre. The sequel first appeared in 2013. It was free with IAP, but made to be unobtrusive and non-essential. I remember enjoying it quite a bit but eventually lost touch with it. I decided to give it another whirl. Unfortunately, it’s such a horrendously cluttered experience that I can’t even find my way around the menu anymore.
4. Opus Magnum: I appreciate that it played at fullscreen and that changing the resolution had the effect of changing the UI scaling rather than changing the desktop resolution. It is another machine-building game from Zachtronics, in the same spirit of their SpaceChem game, which I very much enjoyed. I rather love the soundtrack too.
5. Stories Untold: Not sure what this is about, but I picked it up a few months ago since it promised some sort of retro-80s nostalgia trip, at least owing to the aesthetics of the artwork. Starting up the game, it seems to be an old school interactive fiction text adventure, played through a classic CRT on an 8-bit computer that strongly resembles a Spectrum ZX with integrated cassette loader (which makes sense since this seems to have been developed by a U.K. dev house). I suspect that there is supposed to be more to the game than just this simple IF game. Unfortunately, I was unable to get very far in the first story since I couldn’t seem to persuade the text parser to allow me walk around the back of the house so I could turn on the generator so I could then proceed inside the house.
6. Observation: This is from the same people as Stories Untold (I probably picked them up in a bundle as they seem to be on sale together frequently). I didn’t have high hopes after Stories Untold, but I took the opportunity to quickly clear it off my “unplayed” list. You’re supposed to play as a space station AI computer. I couldn’t figure out how to do anything and I didn’t care enough to try harder, after the previous disappointment.
7. Peggle Deluxe: This was on sale in a pack with its sequel, Nights, so it was a no-brainer to pick up this addictive casual game and play through it again.
8. StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void: I wanted to get back into playing StarCraft II, with the Protoss campaign (Legacy of the Void). I didn’t get too deep into it. Protoss is not the most intuitive faction to play.
9. Mahjong Epic (iOS): Always fun to sink some time into this one.
10. Siege of Centauri: I had this tower defense title on my Steam wish list for quite awhile and it never went down enough in price for me to pick it up. However, it eventually showed up in a Humble Bundle of games that included others I wanted to try, so I finally get to try it. It’s reminiscent of Defense Grid, which is positive. It just annoys me that the game pushes my GPU to 100% no matter what the graphical settings are. I suspect that it isn’t really that taxing; rather that the frame rate might be uncapped. At least the game provides UI scaling.
11. When Ski Lifts Go Wrong: I saw this in a Humble Bundle and it was the only game in the bundle that looked interesting. Fortunately, it was on sale for cheap on Steam at the same time. It’s like a physics puzzler where you are trying to construct minimally strong ski lifts, lest the skiiers, um… die. “Fail fast,” as they say. Regrettably, I couldn’t figure out how to get past the second level in the tutorial. It seems like a game bug that others have also reported on the Steam forum. At least I got an achievement out of my brief play session, for committing manslaughter against 5 skiiers.
12. Styx: Master of Shadows: I’ve had my eye on this one for awhile and it finally came up on sale cheap enough that I bought it. It’s a really good experience– from the very start, it automatically detects the best graphical settings and runs fullscreen. I think the story is strong with just the right amount of bizarre fantasy worldbuilding. I’m rusty at the core stealth gameplay but I’m still having a lot of fun with it. At 4.5 hours, I finally finished the first mission, which I’m led to believe was essentially the tutorial mission. So I’m not sure how plausible it is for me to consider ever finishing it. Also, the story cutscenes after this first mission have a jarring change of art style which drove me nuts.
13. Resident Evil 4: There was a Capcom publisher sale in April which reminded me that I already have this game in my library, which makes it the 3rd time I have purchased the same game. I bought it on its original platform (GameCube) in 2006. I purchased a digital edition of it on the PlayStation 3 in 2011, which was an upgrade in that it added widescreen support to a previously 4:3 aspect ratio game. Then I purchased this Steam version which promised to be the most HD version yet. I was easily able to get it running at full 4K and I guess it looks pretty good– not great.
14. Sega Mega Drive and Genesis Classics: Beyond Oasis: I decided to dust off this large collection of emulated Genesis games and continue working through alphabetically. This game had a great intro. But the game play struck me as a bit too RPG-ish, which was not something I was looking for in a quick play session.
15. Sega Mega Drive and Genesis Classics: Bio Hazard Battle: This is more like it! After bailing out of Beyond Oasis pretty quickly, I dove into this title, which turns out to be a pretty creative little shoot-em-up game that features giant bugs (both antagonists and protagonists). It was challenging but still a lot of fun; it became a little easier when I recognized that the powerups were there to be collected and not avoided as indestructible objects on the playfield. There is some unconventional shmup game play in that you have some companion weapons that fly near you, but whose aiming direction is influenced by the opposite direction in which you are flying.
16. Beyond Blue: From a pack of Earth Day Humble Bundle games. Really beautiful underwater game, especially at 4K.
17. Zen Pinball (iOS/Android): I launched this on my iPad to play a round of the default freebie board. Then I tried to see if I could access some old boards I purchased a long time ago. Nope. But I could access them on the Android version. Turns out that I purchased about 1/2 dozen boards nearly a decade ago. However, Zen Pinball doesn’t allow transferring purchases between platforms. Later on, it was the first game I booted up on my new Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 phone. I have always enjoyed this game but it’s hard to play on the new phone because the screen is so tall and skinny, making it difficult to play in portrait mode. Landscape mode is more playable, but you don’t have the benefit of seeing very much of the board.
18. Infectonator: Survivors: I listened to an audiobook called The Junkie Quatrain, essentially about survivors trying to make it in a ruined city full of zombies. It reminded me of this game, so I went back to play it. I had a good time but I eventually had to put it down as it got too repetitive and frustrating for me.
19. Super House of Dead Ninjas: Just another romp with a fun old game.
20. SimplePlanes: A bundle of HOTAS (Hands-On Throttle And Stick)-enabled games showed up on Humble Bundle and tempted me. So I bought a Logitech X52 HOTAS and wanted to see what I could do with it. I started with this game because, well, it had simple in the title and I wanted to start easy. This game has you building planes and then flying them. I got through the building tutorial but I was unable to get the HOTAS to work with this game.
21. DCS World: This is a game that uses the model of giving away a little bit (in the form of a few different military aircraft types) and then having an enormous amount of DLC for purchase (many other aircraft types). This is when I started to figure out something crucial– I don’t know anything about flying. I need to figure out some way to learn the basics and flying and how that applies to flight simulation software.
22. Elite: Dangerous: Another big reason I wanted to try out a HOTAS– flying in this game is supposed to be a natural fit for the control scheme. Again, I couldn’t get too deep into it because I am just not competent at flying yet.
23. Masters of Anima: I got the impression that this was a puzzle game or tower defense game. It’s not quite either, at least during my brief playthrough. It has some interesting art styles happening. The cut scenes remind me of Disney’s Hercules. The game engine and graphics remind me more of StarCraft II, mostly of the Protoss variety of graphics. I think the game has more in common with games like God of War and Darksiders, though.
24. Blaster Master Zero: I recently learned of this series of upgraded remakes/sequels of the original Blaster Master game. I put a lot of time into the original Blaster Master game on the NES. This game reminds me of DuckTales Remastered in that it’s an improvement in the storyline of the original. The graphics are a little too low-res, but it’s still fun.
25. Velvet Assassin: I felt like playing a game for the first time in a long time on Halloween night, after I shut down my home’s trick-or-treating operation. I chose this stealth action game that I picked up for a whole dollar at a recent sale. The first thing I really appreciated was that it starts with a Windows dialog box that offers graphical configuration before launching the game. Usually, games try to launch in a low-res mode, mess up the desktop, and I have to configure the settings in game. So I was able to configure the game at 4K, maxed on all settings, and it’s quite lovely, at least outside, before the titular character gets into the dark, drab indoor environments.
26. Xeodrifter: Retro pixel space platformer that I can’t really figure out. It’s interesting for the fact that it uses a window frame to handle configuration items.
27. Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle: The King of Dragons: An arcade game that I have never experienced before (Lol! I later realized that I wrote up this same game in the previous year– goes to show how much of an impact it made on me). I played it as long as I could before the monotony of classic arcade style action became too much for me.
28. Banana Hell: This falls into the category of impossible platformer. Fun, but incredibly difficult. Weirdly, that doesn’t put me off. I keep on trying.
29. Dungeon Warfare II: Thanksgiving weekend rolled around and it occurred to me that I have often played a bunch of TD games on previous such weekends. Since I didn’t have any new games purchased from the traditional sale, I looked for an older game that I hadn’t played as much. I had about 5 hours on record when I delved into the game this time. I was surprised it was that many. I thought I had discarded the game pretty quickly the last time I tried it. Pretty fun this time around.
30. Box: The Game: The game was free on Steam. It was a delightful, quick romp of a puzzle game.
31. Stars In Shadow: I wish I understood why I am so infatuated with the idea of understanding 4X games. I tried playing this one but got too bored a few minutes into it. I liked the cartoonish aesthetic, though.
32. Talisman: Digital Edition (Android): I got this in a Humble Bundle of tabletop games. I side-loaded it onto my new Android phone. Then I realized it was some sort of card game and quickly lost interest.
33. Mysterium: A Psychic Clue Game (Android): Pretty, but I really didn’t understand what was going on. It’s sort of the opposite end of what usually happens– normally, games have way too much tutorializing. This one didn’t seem to have enough.
34. American Truck Simulator: I fired this up for a quick play session since a MobyGames contact needed confirmation that the game does, indeed, feature gas stations that showcase the price of gas. This critical data was needed for a Steam game group. I even pulled into a station and tried to fill up, but I couldn’t figure out the hotkey to enable that action.

[ Previous entries: 2016 … 2017 … 2018 … 2019 ]

My Steam record indicates that I finished 2020 with 1,934 hours. Vs. the finishing line of 1,566 hours last year, that means I somehow only accumulated 368 hours of Steam gaming for the past year. Seems like I would have played more, given the state of things in 2020.

I still played too much They Are Billions. There was that whole thing with a virus and being technically required to stay in the house, plus being unemployed for a spell. There were too many days in which I sank into playing endless hours of Billions while listening to audiobooks or podcasts and not leaving the house.

Not a complaint, necessarily.

Over at MobyGames, I managed to contribute a bit more than 600 points’ worth of historical game data, again skewing toward promo art harvested from old magazines, catalogs, and press assets CD-ROMs. I stalled out early in the year, however, because I felt like it was moving too slowly. There is a lot of manual tedium in the processing of each promo image and I started to brainstorm process improvements to help alleviate that tedium. This is still an ongoing project as I am preparing better tools to help with the extraction, processing, and submission of these promo art assets, both for myself and any other contributors who would like to assist. Thus far, I have downloaded more than 7000 computer and video game-related magazines from the Internet Archive, nearly all of which are known to contain some video game advertisements– and I only prioritize the downloading of English-language magazines too! Clearly, some optimizations are called for.

Further, I have finally started taking my MobyGames approval role seriously. I have been an approver for well over a decade. But in the past month, I have actually started approving a few of the backed-up queues, starting with the promo art queue, which doesn’t get much love. During December, I managed to approve more than 2000 pieces of promo art.

I have also finally started uploading some material to the Internet Archive. It’s a bit slowgoing because I have a lot of material, but the physical artifacts still need scanning, and I’m working on those process improvements (see above) so it doesn’t take me so long.

Some details about all the games I touched this past year…

1. Cursed Treasure 2: I managed to stay off of video games entirely until January 24 this year. I started picking up a few cheap games during the Year of the Rat Lunar New Year sale. This is tower defense that reminds me strongly of Kingdom Rush, just not quite as good. The biggest problem I had was getting the game running in full screen, with a visible mouse pointer, and with a reasonably sized UI.
2. Ancient Planet: Another TD game from the Lunar New Year sale. This was a good deal more enjoyable than the previous TD game. It definitely feels like a mobile-first title based on the controls. Indeed, it is available on mobile platforms. But it still hooked me for a little while.
3. They Are Billions: Okay, after 2 TD games, I fell back into Billions. Maybe I’ll just resolve to only play once a week, just to have a go at the weekly community challenge. Eventually, a particular Saturday in March rolled around and I realized it was the one-year anniversary of when I got hooked on this game. My total playtime on this momentous occasion stood at 473 hours. A week later is when the quarantines/lockdowns hit my area and I’m pretty sure I decided to just sit inside my house and play this game for 3 days straight. At 568 hours (April), I finally beat a game at 220%, beating the previous best of 170%. Somewhere along the line, I also completed a game at 270%. As of August 12, I wiped the game from my system yet again after logging 653 hours total. I fell off the wagon in early December (clean for 4 months!) and started playing again. I ended this year with 710 hours in the game; last year’s entry indicates that I had nearly 400 hours. So, about 300 of my 368 Steam hours this year got sunk into this game… I believe the correct internet acronym is smh… By the end of the year, I kept falling into this trap of playing at 350% and not playing at a high-enough level of skill to get very far. It’s roughly the equivalent of bouncing a rubber ball against the wall– something to keep my hands occupied while I’m listening to audiobooks. If I return to this game in the coming year, I hope I just keep it to the weekly Community Challenge, which tends to be manageable. It’s one of those games where I realize I’m already as good at this game as I ever care to be– I’ve watched numerous Twitch streams of really awesomely skilled players cruising through the game at 900% (the highest difficulty) and it’s something I don’t really want to pursue.
4. DOOM (2016): This game made a considerable splash among FPS fans when it came out a few years ago. It was on sale for cheap early in the year and I figured it might give my new GPU (RTX 2070) a run for its money at 4K. Actually, it’s not that stressful– only about 70% utilization on max possible settings for 4K. And unlike with Quake/RTX, I can actually perceive how awesome the graphics look. And it’s fairly fun and doesn’t make me too dizzy. One issue, however, is the 70 GB of HD space it requires when fully downloaded and installed. I have a large conventional HD but also a smaller SSD that is reserved for games I would like to access quickly (as well as an M.2 SSD boot drive). I had to do some juggling between the HD and 120 GB SSD to free up enough space that I could move DOOM over to the SSD. I’m so bad at the game that I frequently have to continue from the previous checkpoint, which incurs an intolerable load time from the HD. With the SSD, I’m back into the action in under 10 seconds.
5. Concrete Jungle: Sounded like a neat concept so I finally gave it a spin. It’s one of those titles that elicited a “GAH! I’m sooooo bored!” reaction a few minutes into the tutorial and I quickly bailed out.
6. Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle: The King of Dragons: I dusted off the Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle, which has 7 classic Capcom arcade brawlers, many of which I never actually saw in the arcade. I gave this one a spin until I couldn’t handle the monotony of the classic arcade style of free play anymore.
7. Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle: Armored Warriors: Another item from the Beat ‘Em Up Bundle that I never actually saw in the arcades back in the day. It definitely has a unique aesthetic with its mech combat.
8. Shadowgate: Trying to get back into this. I’m not sure how much I need to keep the classic Shadowgate in mind as I play this, i.e., how much is just a straight remaster of the original.
9. Castle Crashers: After playing the classic Capcom arcade brawlers, I had a desire to play a similar game with deeper gameplay, and Castle Crashers fits that bill.
10. Zen Pinball (iOS): Prepping for a long plane ride, this is the first game I put on a refreshed iPad.
11. Hitman GO (iOS): Good airplane game to occupy my time while I simultaneously listen to an audiobook. I’ve played this game’s companions (loved Lara Croft GO; couldn’t figure out Deus Ex GO) and this still manages to be unique among them. I’m a sucker for novel aesthetics and I love the commitment to the board game look of this game.
12. Dissembler (iOS): Another fun casual puzzle game for my iPad.
13. Monument Valley (iOS): The Escher-inspired title continues to be a fallback when I need an iPad time-waster.
14. Pocket City: It didn’t make an impression. I think this was the point on my long plane flight that I decided to just read a book on my iPad.
15. F-Zero (SNES Classic Mini): I reorganized my entertainment center which made it easier for me to play my SNES Classic Mini. I’m trying to get somewhere on F-Zero. I’ve never made it past the fourth track (Death Wind).
16. Mahjong Epic (iOS): I wanted a good Mahjong Solitaire game for my iPad. This fit the bill nicely. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to find a mobile Mahjong game that doesn’t have a subscription for removing ads, but I found one.
17. Party Hard 2: The first game in the series grabbed me hard. Seriously, I couldn’t quit playing until my main gaming computer started to die (main hard drive started to give out). I remember seeing a few screenshots of this sequel while in development. I thought that they were trying to make it look like PS1-era graphics as an evolution to the original entry 8/16-bit type of graphics. Fortunately, the final 3D environments are much better– perhaps the dev screenshots were just early development scaffolding without the polish. Anyway, I want to like this game but it’s just not grabbing me like the original. In this facet, it reminds me of the Dungeon Warfare  franchise– the first one grabbed me and wouldn’t let go until I completed the whole thing, while I’m just not as good at the sequel and can’t bring myself to get more motivated. I have to say, however, that the audio engineering is on-point– as you move in and out of the area where the main party is taking place, the audio level reflects that.
18. Ori and the Blind Forest: This falls into the category of “really beautiful platformer,” like Astal or Seasons After Fall. Amazing watercolor art style. I learned of it from a Penny Arcade comic and it made me curious.
19. Resident Evil 3: Raccoon City Demo: It’s free so I tried it out. First, I had to go through the ritual of letting it mess with my monitors’ resolutions as it tried to spread one continuous game window across 2 (but not all 3) of my desktop monitors. When it started running, it decided to run on my main 4K monitor, which was nice. I gave it a few minutes and mostly spent that time gawking at the Easter eggs / member berries in the game (toy store with the Mega Man doll; “1942” movie poster as a pastiche of the Top Gun movie poster style).
    
    

    Resident Evil 3 – Mega Man doll

    
    
    

    Resident Evil 3 – 1942 Movie Poster

20. TIS-100: I’ve owned this assembly language programming simulator for a long time now and Steam still reports it as one of my most played games, at 10 hours. This is because the first time I booted it up, I clicked the button in game to view the programming manual, which launched an external PDF viewer while the game was still running, and then I went to bed, and accidentally logged 10 hours. Not sure why that matters to me. Anyway, every time I booted up the game, I was just confused about what to do. Finally, I started it up and I understood what I was supposed to do. Now I’m having a great time with the game.
21. Halo: Spartan Strike: I’ve played the preceding game– Spartan Assault. I remember wanting to like it but that it didn’t really grow on me. I knew this would be more of the same. But it was on sale for about a dollar, so why not? I knew it would at least be pretty, and I was right– runs beautifully at 4K. And it actually is growing on me just a bit more than the previous game.
22. Elite Dangerous: I wanted to give this game another honest attempt. So I jumped into the pilot training / combat simulator mode with a keyboard control cheat sheet up on a side monitor. It made me dizzy. Runs great at 4K, though.
23. Halo: Spartan Assault: I was enjoying Spartan Strike so much that I decided to give the predecessor another spin.
24. Kingdom Rush: This old favorite boasted some new content so I decided to fire it up again to enjoy it again, but on a bigger 4K monitor. Regrettably, playing the game in fullscreen hides the mouse pointer so I have to play in a window.
25. Bloons TD6: I remember playing a Bloons game in the very early days of the iOS App Store, where the point was just to pop balloons (until writing this, I completely forgot that I’m the one who submitted the iPhone screenshots to the database). Somewhere along the line, the developer morphed the Bloons brand into a tower defense franchise. Steam had a TD sale in April and, improbably, this is the only game I purchased. This is my first foray into Bloons TD and they have somehow already gotten to volume 6. It’s super-cartoonish, but that doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is the complicated upgrade paths, apparently a holdover from the mobile, IAP-enabled edition. I only played it for a few minutes, getting past the first level. The gameplay experience had me wondering if the game was written in a garbage-collected programming language since the engine seemed to noticeably pause often. That’s not something I ought to be thinking while playing a real-time action game.

And then I arrived at the now-traditional Steam Spring Cleaning event, which attempts to induce players to actually play little-touched games in their libraries. This time, there is a machine learning algorithm surfacing 3 games per day for 7 days. Fortunately (?), I have absolutely every game in my Steam library downloaded, just for laughs, because I installed a larger conventional HD recently, and because my ISP suspended download caps early in the pandemic.

26. Anomaly Defenders: I can already tell this is going to be hugely frustrating to boot up a bunch of fresh, never-been-launched games. Each one wants to monkey with my resolution at first start-up. This launched at 1440×809, a bizarre resolution that I’m led to believe is a fractional scaling factor applied to a more sane resolution. Still, everything appears to be in the wrong aspect ratio. I tried to change it via the main menu’s settings but the controls didn’t work. Some of the controls were also covered by the logo. However, upon a relaunch, the game sorted itself out and showed up in proper 4K rez. I’m glad I got to experience the game properly because it’s a reasonably competent tower defense game. It adds something new to the genre that I don’t believe I’ve seen yet– the enemies can hit back at your towers. So you need to be concerned with upkeep. I just wish the game had some keyboard controls. As it stands, all the controls flow through the mouse. Also, the art style isn’t particularly distinctive and the different types of units (both friendly and not) are difficult to distinguish.
27. rymdkapsel: For the second day of Spring Cleaning, Steam surfaced this game as one of my 3 choices. I remember giving this a try a long time ago when I bought it on sale, but it didn’t capture my interest. It feels like it should, however. So I tried again. While it correctly goes fullscreen at full 4K upon launch, the UI is still relatively tiny. Also, there is no mouse cursor, a problem I see more and more these days, in fullscreen modes. If I could get the game out of fullscreen mode, it would probably be playable. I couldn’t find any textual configuration files pertaining to the game. Instead, I radically lowered the resolution on my 4K monitor so that I had a chance of hitting the “Options -> Fullscreen” item with the hidden mouse cursor. I was also able to scale up the UI via the options. I’m glad I stuck with it because once I figured out the game, it turned out to be quite a delightful — if brief — romp about building a base using Tetris pieces that kept me occupied for a few hours. I eventually sunk a few more hours into it in an effort to earn more achievements. It’s always a good sign when a game induces me to do want to do that.
28. Kingdom Rush Origins: The theme of day 3 of the Steam Spring Cleaning event was “old flame”, surfacing 3 games that I have already played a lot. I chose to gave Kingdom Rush Origins a whirl. I still haven’t come close to finishing this game. However, while writing this entry, I realized that the next chapter is called Kingdom Rush Vengeance. It’s only on mobile now but I’m sure I’ll buy it when it makes its way to Steam.
29. Mafia II: Day 4 of the Steam Spring Cleaning event was “Time Machine”, which listed the first 3 games added to my Steam library. That means Just Cause II, Mafia II, and … Mafia II: Definitive Edition. So, really, I only had 2 games to choose from. The Mafia II game already in my library has been renamed to Mafia II (Classic). The Definitive Edition is some kind of HD remaster which was only released the week prior to this Spring Cleaning event. I’m not certain if this is one of those limited-time “free for everyone” things on Steam or if I automatically received it because I owned the classic version. The former seems more likely than the latter. Anyway, since I already had the Classic installed, I launched that. While I finished the main game 8 years ago, I realized that there are a bunch of extra missions (DLC?) that I have access to. I delved into “The Betrayal of Jimmy”. I didn’t play too long, but I did shoot up a few gangsters, including nailing several at once by aiming for the gas tank of a truck that they were using for cover; drove to escape a car full of other gangsters chasing me; eventually bailed on the car and got a $50 ticket for hit & run which I got out of with a $300 bribe (which I just realized doesn’t make much sense); tried to steal another car which earned me a police foot chase which I elected to resolve with my fists this time; successfully jacked a fresh car; then finally finished the tutorial mission of this content. So I feel like I got the quintessential open world crime game experience in this brief whirlwind play session.
30. Terraria: Day 5 of the Steam Spring Cleaning event surfaced games in my library recommended by a friend. Only one game in my library qualified — Terraria — so Steam also recommended Black Skylands Origins (free game) and Trials of Mana Demo (also free). I wonder if Terraria will grab me anymore than it has in my previous combined play sessions, totalling all of 45 minutes? NOPE! I still can’t bear to learn how to play it. I did receive 2 new achievements simply for starting the game.
31. Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle: Day 6 of the Steam Spring Cleaning event revolved around enticing users to try the Steam Remote Play feature. I don’t have a whole lot of Steam friends– gaming has never been a social activity for me. However, I realized that I could just launch the game and exit and still get credit toward the Steam badge.
32. Tropico 6: This had a free weekend in July. As always, I like the idea of simulation games but I just couldn’t get into this. I made an effort to get through the extensive tutorial but didn’t finish before the weekend was over. Still, the graphics are a real treat as is the Latin/Caribbean soundtrack.
33. Devolverland Expo: Due to the shutdown of every convention and expo and other large gathering, eccentric developer Devolver Digital put out this odd little commercial for their upcoming games. It did get me interested in their upcoming Carrion game.
34. Oil Rush: This is a game from Unigine that I have had on my wish list forever, long enough to know that it will never go any cheaper than it already is ($8, $10 with full DLC). Unigine makes some impressive graphical demos that I have been watching since 2011, and this game is roughly the same vintage (2012). It puts a decent amount of stress on my RTX 2070 with maxed out settings on 4K. I’m trying to get into the RTS gameplay. It’s awfully stutter-y, as though it’s constantly reaching out to the HD and loading in more data. I give it credit for the music, though.
35. The Ball: Whenever a publisher has a sale on Steam, I scan through to cherry-pick anything that looks interesting that’s also super-cheap. That’s how I ended up with this mysterious game, which turns out to be a first-person puzzle platformer built on some variation of the Unreal Engine. It reminds me a bit of Portal with its manipulation of the Companion Cube. Actually, it’s sort of like Indiana Jones prowling through the ruins of an ancient temple, except that instead of chasing you, the iconic rolling boulder works for you. Hey, it’s a gameplay twist and it works out pretty well.
36. Factorio: This is supposed to be the ultimate logic/programming game for nerd gamers, like myself. This is the year that it finally exited Early Access status. I played the demo but it just wasn’t grabbing me. Or perhaps I kept it at arm’s length because I was afraid that it would grab me.
37. Armor of Heroes: Free game for Sega’s 60th Anniversary. It strikes me as a clone of Combat for the 2600, reskinned with a Company of Heroes theme.
38. Kingdom Rush Vengeance: Works much better on 4K than previous installments, which I always have to run in windowed mode on my 4K monitor, lest I wind up with an invisible mouse pointer. I’m really enjoying the new angle of managing the traditional villains and attacking putative good guys of the franchise. I did get stuck at one level and I don’t have the persistence to push forward like I once had.
39. Endless Zone: Another freebie for Sega’s 60th; this was is a Defender clone themed on Sega’s Endless Space franchise. It’s really frustrating.
40. Streets of Kamurocho: A Streets of Rage (2?) rendition featuring characters and settings from Sega’s Yakuza franchise. This has been my favorite of the Sega 60th freebies so far. I can’t believe how much I remember the game mechanics of the SoR franchise. There is only one level in this particular freebie game and when you finish, you start over again. Play it through twice and you unlock a special character who, if you actually played the Yakuza franchise, might be familiar to you. Same with the various boss characters. Unfortunately, the characters all play exactly the same. Can’t expect too much from a freebie. It was still a fun 1/2 hour, even if I didn’t know any of the characters, and even if jump-kick was still the key to winning every single boss battle.
41. Golden Axed: A Canceled Prototype: The last of the free games celebrating Sega’s 60th Anniversary. I was a big fan of the Golden Axe brawler back in the arcades of olden times and I was looking forward to this. It is, however, just the first level of the prototype. I still had fun for 10 minutes as I worked out all the possible move and attack combinations that they worked into the game. I played through the level twice since Streets of Kamurocho taught me to expect a bonus if I played it enough (like another character). But alas.
42. SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics: Golden Axe: This is an emulator framework for the SEGA Genesis that features individual games as DLC. During the SEGA 60th Anniversary, the entire bundle of nearly 60 games was very cheap so I took the plunge. After playing Golden Axed, I wanted to see how it stacked up against my memories of the original game. Actually, I don’t think I ever played the Genesis version, only the arcade. This version doesn’t really compare favorably to the arcade.
43. SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics: Streets of Rage: After Golden Axe, I wanted to give the original Streets of Rage a whirl, having played the freebie Yakuza remix. This shaped up to be much more fun than Golden Axe. The most humorous aspect that stood out to me while playing as a grown-up was that the fighters that the player gets to choose from are all ex-cops… who are each between the ages of 21-23. I guess they needed to keep the ages relatively young in order to make them a bit more relatable to the kids who would be playing the games.
44. SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics: Alien Storm: At this point, I’m just starting to work through games I haven’t heard of before, such as Alien Storm. It has it’s charm. I appreciate that the artists didn’t stick to standard humanoid alien forms, rather letting their creativity flow.
45. SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics: Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle: Now I’m just proceeding through the big game collection alphabetically. This is a frustrating platformer where you can only take one hit– my least favorite type of platformer.
46. Super Gridland (iOS): Started auditioning some decent iOS games (with the help of No BS Games) and found this one. It’s surprisingly challenging.
47. Minesweeper Genius (iOS): Another very simple logic/puzzle game in the tradition of the old Minesweeper game.
48. Million Onion Hotel (iOS): Odd, but strangely fun. That’s all I can say about it.

And that was it for my game-playing for 2020. Too bad Steam doesn’t allow generating a pie chart of games played so that I could see how Billions dominated all the other games on this list. Billions is supposed to be an RTS and it seems like the many, many other RTS games in my collection should be able to slake the same appetite. To that end, I would like to give another try at completing StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm (Zerg campaign) and also jump into Legacy of the Void (Protoss campaign).

Further, at the end of the year, I finally scrubbed through my big spreadsheet of games and submitted outstanding cover art for games that used to be missing but have since been entered by other users. I think this is the first time I have performed the complete exercise in 2 years. It reminds me of how many fascinating[-sounding] titles I have in my collection that really need to be played and archived via MobyGames, lest the internet at large have no useful record of the game’s existence.

2016, 2017, 2018… now it’s time to discuss 2019.

Okay, let’s see: I went into 2018 with 1,114 hours on Steam — having logged about 200 hours throughout the year — and ended with 1,566 hours, about 450 hours… and nearly 400 of those were attributable to a rather unhealthy obsession with an odd little game called They Are Billions. This blows past my previous #1 Steam game (Defense Grid, which took me many, many years of playtime to reach just 325 hours). When framed that way, the rest of this list seems pretty negligible in terms of total playtime. Billions probably warrants a separate blog post regarding my personal struggle with video gaming addiction.

As I resolved at the start of the year, I did eventually get a 4K monitor in May (long, 6-month upgrade project as I gradually upgraded the PSU, then the GPU, and then finally bought the monitor). It was always a trial to find out which games don’t reliably support 4K, normally in the form of a UI that doesn’t scale.

I also got a Steam Controller near the end of the year since Steam was clearing out the last of their inventory. I still haven’t found a good use for it, but I haven’t given up on it yet. At least it only cost US$5 (plus US$14 S&H).

Over at MobyGames, I managed to finish out the year with exactly 20,000 contribution points. All but one of the 172 points I earned were due to my new hobby of scavenging old promo art for games.

On to the list…

1. Defense Grid: The Awakening: Starting the year off strong (or lazily?) with a game that has 294 hours invested into it at the start of the year.
2. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon: This is a retro NES-style game that is strongly inspired by Castlevania. Actually, “inspired” is too generous of a word– this is primarily Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse with the serial numbers filed off. Gameplay characteristics are extremely similar; the music seems to be just a few notes removed from the classics. But I guess that’s okay with me. There are also a fair number of improvements, such as the obvious graphical improvement of parallax backgrounds; heart powerups recovered from lamps actually restore health; lamps that yield new weapons are a different color so it’s harder to screw oneself out of a preferred special weapon; there is a configurable difficulty, which allows me to run through it on an easier sightseeing-tour sort of difficulty; configurable knock-back which alleviates a huge frustration of the traditional Castlevania gameplay.
3. Syder Arcade: Good action game to play while on the exercise bike. I finally finished the main campaign. The boss I was stuck on for a long time turned out to be the final boss. Now I get to play it again and with different difficulty levels. I’m really appreciating this game more thoroughly, just for its graphics and music. I must be really into it because I’ve gotten to the point where I am trying to obtain all of the achievements (the reasonable ones– there are 3 that revolve around being tops in the leaderboards). Later in the year, I upgraded to a 4K setup. Rather than playing games in 4K and 60fps, I often just look on YouTube for captures if the same. I noticed that Syder Arcade had no such captures. So I endeavored to fill the gap. Enjoy.
4. X-Morph Defense: A tower defense game that has been on my wish list for awhile. During a sale, I noticed that it has a demo. So I elected to try that first. It has an interesting inversion of the traditional TD model, in that you play as the invading alien force. But I had trouble adapting to the overall control scheme.
5. Galak-Z: After getting back into Syder Arcade in a big way, I got an itch to play another space action game with awesome graphics and sound. I really want to enjoy this Galak-Z game (possibly because every single character and vehicle reminds me fondly of Robotech/Macross, to the point of making me wonder how the creators avoided a lawsuit by the notably litigious Harmony Gold) but the core gameplay just isn’t grabbing me.
6. The Disney Afternoon Collection: Darkwing Duck: I was enjoying this OCRemix of a Darkwing Duck NES tune and I realized I have never actually played that particular title. I have it easily playable, courtesy of the Steam release of the Disney Afternoon Collection. Just another game that reminds me how bad I am at old NES action games. I can’t get past the first bridge level, and I’m really trying, too!
7. Battletech: This game had a free weekend in February. Ever in search of a turn-based strategy game that will engross me as XCOM once did, I gave it a whirl. I knew that this has a massive pile of lore and I worried that I might have felt locked out of the story, the same way I felt as I played a Halo or Warhammer 40000 game. But this actually has a great, simple intro that quickly brings you up to speed on the overall concept of the Battletech universe. Regrettably, the game crashed after I completed the tutorial. I gave it another try a little later during free weekend, but couldn’t even begin to get into it. Yep, I’m feeling the effect of story lockout– I just don’t understand what all the characters are going on about, and I’m not versed in which giant robots are good for what. And all the giant robot combat just looks incredibly goofy.
8. Kingdom Rush Origins: I only got about 40% through this game last year. I’m supposed to love this series and this genre of game, so I’m pushing back into it.
9. Mortal Kombat X: Free weekend, so why not check it out? I’ll tell you why not– 35 GB download for one thing. And the game is just weird. It makes you pick from among 5 factions (I chose Special Forces) and then walks you through a story mode featuring the most absurd action cinematics I have witnessed in a long time. I keep expecting alternate game modes to break out, and indeed, there are some QTE-laden segments. But eventually, some well-known MK characters show up to square off with series mainstay Johnny Cage who is the character I must play as. I managed to get through Scorpion and Sub-Zero before Jax got the better of me. That’s when I decided I had seen enough. I’ll stick with Mortal Kombat Armageddon on the original Xbox if I need an MK fix.
10. Bad ass Babes: This is a video game art style I never thought I would encounter again– filmed actors performing action, a la (original) Mortal Kombat, Pit Fighter, and Lethal Enforcers. But I guess nothing is too sacred or cheesy that it can’t be revived as retro-kitsch 2 decades after its prime. I have since been informed that there are actually more games which ape this particular retro-aesthetic. I gave this game a whirl (on International Women’s Day, incidentally) and it’s… well, it’s juvenile– let’s just get that out of the way up front. Still, thought went into the game design and the challenge does ramp up. You can’t rely on 1 or 2 moves throughout the game. You keep meeting more enemies that require different strategies. The game technically supports controllers, but it’s hugely frustrating to set it up. Also, it lacks Steam achievements but features “Fake Trophies” internally.
11. Ultra Street Fighter IV: Playing Mortal Kombat just made me want to play Street Fighter instead (much like any other RTS just makes me want to boot up StarCraft II). So I fired this up after a few rounds of MK-X frustration and confusion.
12. Parcel: I sometimes try to get back into this puzzle game but it never quite clicks for me.
13. They Are Billions: I normally eschew early access Steam games. But I have watched a bunch of They Are Billions gameplay via Twitch. I sort of got the impression that it was like the ultimate tower defense game. Truthfully, it’s mechanically a proper RTS (at least if the UI is anything to go by), but I’m still glad I jumped in. The voice acting leaves much to be desired, but I already knew that from the Twitch streams. Progress report: 36 hours in and I just earned my first achievement, finally! 57 hours and I still can’t get enough. I figure out something new about this game every time I play. After 126 hours of play time spread across nearly 2 months, I finally managed to win my first survival game. Granted, it was with a score factor of 22%, but I had to start somewhere. I eventually deleted the game deliberately after about 140 hours because it was too easy to just get sucked back into playing it. I reinstalled it for one more round as soon as I got my 4K monitor, though. After 161 hours, I have finally completed my second game (score factor of 75%). After 185 hours, they finally released v1.0, leaving Early Access. At 208 hours, I won my 3rd survival game (score factor of 95%). At 212 hours, I won my 4th survival game and my first game at 100% score factor. By the end of the year, the best I had done was completing a survival game at 170% score factor. Pertaining to v1.0, the game got a proper release mode with a full campaign story mode. I tried to play this. But since it follows the pattern of “single player campaign as extended tutorial”, it was extremely dull to play since I had more or less mastered all the basics of the game on my own. So I gave up on the campaign pretty quickly.
14. Pembrey: How did this game end up in my Steam library? Oh, now I remember: out of those hundreds of trading cards that Steam randomly gives me, I realized that I actually had a complete set for one game (Ball of Wonder). So I got to redeem it for a prize pack that contained, among other items, a copy of this game. I think this is what the kids these days are calling a “visual novel”. It’s not so much a game as it is a piece of 2D, SNES-style machinima, with a mild amount of token interactivity. I keep wondering how it might have gone over in the SNES days, if the audiences would have demanded a bit more gameplay elements and replayability (I haven’t finished the game yet but I suspect that it’s the type of game you can only really play once).
15. Monument Valley (Android): Since Chromebooks can run Android apps, I rediscovered this Escher-inspired puzzle game.
16. Stellaris: A popular 4X game from a few years ago which had a free weekend on Steam in May. Normally, 4X games intimidate me. But I’m feeling a bit more bold after figuring out They Are Billions all on my own (yeah, that’s of the RTS genre, but still complex by my standards). I’ll see if I can work through the entire tutorial before the free weekend is up. I decided to play a metagame of how long I could play it before the siren song of Billions calls me back. I played for about 20 minutes, getting my surveying ship to Alpha Centauri, before the game glitched and froze on me, thus making my decision to go back to Billions much easier.
17. Quake II RTX/Vulkan Edition: I procured an NVIDIA RTX 2070 card recently and am still looking for things to do with it. I heard that there was a newly re-engineered version of Quake II available which takes advantage of the hardware ray-tracing features. If I max out the game’s settings at 1920x1200x60fps (pre-4K monitor acquisition), I can indeed peg my card’s GPU meter, so that’s something, I guess. The experience is lost on me, though. I’m still no good at FPS games. Also, it seems to be impossible to invert the mouse, which is something I require in this type of game. Further, whenever a new 3D tech shows up, one of the Quake games seems to get an upgrade in order to show off the tech. But since I have no memory of how it originally looked, I have no appreciation of the graphical upgrades.
18. Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle: Final Fight: This is the point when I deleted They Are Billions to keep myself from mindlessly drifting back into playing. The Capcom Beat Em Up Bundle has 7 old Capcom arcade brawlers. I was most familiar with Final Fight since I surely pumped $100 in quarters and tokens into that machine circa 1990.
19. Basingstoke: A new game from Puppygames, a developer with a very distinct style. I have put an inordinate number of hours into their Space Invaders clone Titan Attacks and I decided to try this one when it dropped (I had a signifcant coupon). It didn’t grab me. I actually opted to return it to the Steam Store, which is the first time I have exercised that feature after more than 200 games procured through the service.
20. Nights Into Dreams: A classic title from Sega that is on Steam now. I remember this being a big deal for the Sega Saturn. I am also fairly familiar with the soundtrack thanks to numerous remixes/alternate arrangements of the game’s music on OCRemix. My cursory impression of the actual game, however, is that it was designed to be a graphical extravaganza for the Saturn, rather than offering any major gameplay innovations.
21. Iron Marines: A new title from Ironhide studios, who make the various Kingdom Rush tower defense games that I adore. This one has a similar art style but set in a sci-fi universe rather than a fantasy one. Also, it’s trying to be more of an RTS rather than a TD game. I’m learning that the key to really getting into a TD game is to learn the hotkeys. Fortunately, this one has them and they are customizable.
22. Grim Dawn: I played this because it was free for the Memorial Day Weekend Spring Cleaning event on Steam. I have seen this advertised on the store and I always mistook it for being in the Warhammer 40,000 universe (due to the pilgrim hat seen in the cover art for this game, compared to this inquisitor character from 40K). Nope, it’s its own thing. It’s a hack-n-slash RPG affair, much in the vein of Diablo and friends. The only other game of this sort that I have played is Diablo III, which didn’t impress me much. The core gameplay of this type of title seems to just be clicking on enemies until either they fall over, or until you do. If they fall over, scavenge for loot and then sort through it. That presented a new problem that I expect to see more and more frequently with my new 4K monitor: UIs that aren’t aware of 4K resolution and don’t provide appropriate scaling.
23. Kingdom Rush: Played briefly for the Steam Spring Cleaning event. Didn’t get hooked, though; got too many other games that are drawing me in now.
24. Assetto Corsa: Free for the Steam Spring Cleaning Event. Another itty bitty UI for my new 4K monitor to chew on. The download for this was something like 10 GB and I couldn’t figure out how to even start playing. I wish these “serious” racers would have a simple arcade mode for the uninitiated.
25. Master Spy: I think this might be the last of the 7 games I bought during the Steam summer sale nearly 2 years ago (I always remember that since it was the first sale after I started using my wish list feature extensively in order to track games that looked interesting; when the sale came, I just purchased everything on the list that cost less than $5). It turns out to be a novel little puzzle game that reminds me vaguely of Gunpoint (but much simpler).
26. The Final Station: I think I procured this via a Humble Bundle last year. It was this year’s Steam Spring Cleaning event which induced me to give it a try. I knew the game had something to do with conducting a train during the collapse of civilization. The game doesn’t give you much to go on in the beginning, just encouraging you to figure things out as you go along. I found it strangely engrossing as I gave it about an hour before the gameplay got too frustrating for me. Then I looked up the plot synopsis on Wikipedia. I may track down a full-length Let’s Play/Long Play on YouTube sometime to watch it play out. Also, this game is another member of the “screw u and ur new 4k monitor lol!” club. I can set the resolution to 4k but most of the relevant graphics are rendered on the bottom 3rd of the screen. Fortunately, it renders at lower resolutions without switching the video mode.
27. Endless Space 2: Another 4X game, and space-based, to boot! It was free to play on Memorial Day weekend for the Steam Spring Cleaning event and I was induced to try it because the system was rewarding playtime with digital Tchotchkes. This was the last of the 7 free-weekend games that looked interesting to me. It’s almost like I’m hoping that if I try enough 4X games that one will finally click for me. Out of all the 4X games I have tried, I think this one actually might have the potential to get me interested in the genre. The interface seems a bit friendlier, at least in comparison to Stellaris, the free-weekend, space-based 4X from a few weeks ago. And it renders beautifully at 4K resolution.
28. Frostpunk: This is another post-apocalyptic city-building game. I figured it might speak to me the same way that They Are Billions does. It was a little tough for me to figure out at first but I eventually started climbing that tech tree and progressing in the game. This thing is bleak in a way that Billions could only dream. I’m trying to figure out the difference. I suppose it’s because in Billions, you’re fighting an opponent you can actually beat. In Frostpunk, it’s the oppressive force of the unrelenting cold weather. It’s also rather pretty, art-wise, and pegs my GPU meter at 100% using my new 4K monitor.
29. Anomaly: Warzone Earth: After playing Frostpunk for a few hours, I browsed what other games were developed or published by 11 bit Studios. They have put out a whole series of Anomaly titles which are tagged as “tower defense”. There is a bundle of 5 items in the whole series which was deeply discounted for the Steam Summer Sale. First off, this first title messes with the video mode in a really strange way. Also, the highest video mode in offered me was 1920×1209 (?!). All of the video modes listed really strange resolutions. The gameplay didn’t do much for me as it’s supposed to be some kind of reverse TD (you’re attacking the tower defense’d position). I finished the first mission but don’t have a strong desire to see what comes next. The control scheme seemed wonky and limited, but maybe that’s because I was using a mouse and keyboard. I could tell from the UI that a game controller must be supported and this turns out to be correct. Perhaps it’s more comfortable to play that way.
30. Dungeon Warfare 2: I heard about this game a full year after its Steam release date, and I learned of its existence thanks to an iOS games forum. This strikes me as a stunning failure of Steam’s recommendation system since the original Dungeon Warfare is my 5th most played game on the Steam platform (#4 before They Are Billions got its hooks into me recently). When I played it, I decided that either it’s much tougher than the original game, or I am losing my touch at TD games.
31. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II: Retribution: I wish I could understand why I keep coming back to this game and trying to make a go of it. Maybe it’s sentimentality due to it being one of the first games I ever added to my Steam library (I bought a boxed copy of the game during a Christmas auction in 2011, a few months after I got on Steam and well before I got into the Steam collector’s mindset). I decided that perhaps my mistake was trying to digest the tutorial. Tutorials are a delicate thing and can easily bore the player to tears (especially if that player is me) if they are too slow and hand-holdy. Instead, I decided to devour the proper manual and jump right into the campaign, especially since I am well familiar with this type of game’s controls. Being an older game, it still runs fine on my new 4K setup at maxed out graphical settings. Unfortunately, it’s another member of the itty bitty UI club. And it still didn’t grab me.
32. Street Fighter V: This game was free for a week in August, which is significantly longer than the normal free weekend that a lot of games will offer. The experience of trying the game turned into an “everything wrong with video games today”-type of ordeal. First, it was nearly 30 GB to download (perhaps that’s why they made the trial period so long?). When I finally get to launch it, of course it messes with my video resolution, messing up all my desktop windows across 3 monitors (happens with a lot of games). I was eager to jump straight to the configuration and drive the resolution up to 4K, but the game first wants to hold my hand through a basic tutorial on gameplay featuring Ryu and Ken. It’s a Street Fighter game! Everyone already knows their way around a basic fight. When I finally skip past all the tutorial battles, I get a EULA and a privacy policy agreement that I have to scroll through using a controller. Then I have to select a country and register a user ID. Urrgh… I just want to play a little Street Fighter! When I finally get to the menu, I am bombarded by about 23 different dialogs about different things happening in the game, from different objectives and events to DLC and trinkets to purchase. At long last, I can access the configuration settings and change the resolution. However, the only way to change the rez is to use the controller to cycle through other resolutions, and the game thinks it’s a good idea to immediately switch to each candidate rez, forcing the process to take much longer than necessary. Anyway, I finally got 4K set and maxed out all the settings. And it actually was worth it because the game is breathtakingly beautiful and runs smoothly at 4K with maxed out settings on my new RTX 2070. Indeed, I would often rather watch the action in the background setpieces rather than focus on the fights.
33. Deus Ex GO (Android): I loaded this back onto my phone in preparation for a long plane trip. On the ride, I eventually arrived at a point where I just wanted to chill with a game so I gave this another spin. I got stuck pretty early on, just like the last time I tried it.
34. Human Resource Machine (Android): I loaded this onto my phone for the same plane trip. Both games came from a Humble Bundle pack of Android puzzle games a long time ago. I’m glad I finally got around to playing this game. I thought it was supposed to be some sort of tower defense game. Instead, it’s a straight-up programming game, though in disguise. I immediately recognized it as a simulation of programming assembly language. And I love it. I wish I had gotten to play it ~30 years ago when I was first trying to comprehend ASM programming. I eventually bought the game on Steam when it went on sale so that I could enjoy it in 4K and harvest Steam achievements.
35. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2: Another Warhammer 40K game, this time a space RTS, and was free for a weekend (and another monster download). The tutorial didn’t grab me at all. Still, I’m always impressed by the diversity of game types which occur in the WH40K universe.
36. 198X: I’m getting rather bored of all the nostalgia pandering of the past few years, but the screenshots on this one still tempted me. This is kind of a “Nothing But Hits” cover of late 1980s/early 1990s arcade games (sort of the Stranger Things of video games) against the backdrop of a brooding teenager contemplating the meaninglessness of being a teenager. The games are quite polished retro affairs– a Final Fight homage, a Gradius/R-type clone, an OutRun tribute, and a game I couldn’t quite peg– I think maybe it was a cross between Shinobi and Strider. The cutscenes between arcade games depicting “Kid’s” melancholy were painfully slow, but perhaps the creators wanted us to share in her pain. I could do without the schmaltzy romanticization of arcade denizens as “the coolest uncool outsiders, rebels, and misfits.” Hey, I was there. But there are many tiny details to admire and appreciate in this game, and the tiniest detail I appreciated was that the racing game had a speedometer that topped out at 255 distance units/hour, just as I noted 12 years ago when I was playing a bunch of old NES racing games.
37. Steampunk Tower 2: It’s a tower defense game and it came up cheap during a Steam sale, so you know I can’t resist. It’s a curious game that boasts a unique art style and a slight variation on the TD mechanic. It also has a small base-building mechanic. The music is rather incongruous with a lazy jazz theme for base-building portion, while something considerably more orchestral plays for the main battle. The upgrade paths are bonkers which makes this feel like it started life as a freemium mobile game, though I can’t find any evidence of that.
38. Prime Mover: Another science-type game (I have been trying to get more into these, probably for the cover of being able to say I’m sharpening some skill or another). I understand how pixel art is a popular aesthetic but I feel that this game takes it way too far.
39. Sine Mora EX: Sine Mora is Latin for “without delay” (recording this here for my own benefit because I can never remember). This shmup was on sale and it looked pretty. So, due to my fondness for the experience of playing Syder Arcade for its graphical glory, I picked this up as well. I’m becoming very appreciative of games that know how to launch at fullscreen 4K without ever touching the video resolution, and that have a UI which scales appropriately (and runs great at 4K, Ultra settings on my RTX 2070). It is indeed a graphical feast, but a little difficult to place– it reminds me of the “World War II-era futuristic” technology on display in Wolfenstein: The New Order (I have since learned that this aesthetic is called Diesel Punk). Oh, and with anthropomorphised animals. Trying to follow the story and decode the jargon and proper nouns in the game makes me feel like I’m missing some language skills. And it’s the first shmup I have played which boasts some type of bullet-time mechanic (called time capsules in this game). Also, there is a timer that gets replenished by destroying enemies. So I guess a pacifist run is out of the question.
40. Seasons After Fall: Look, it’s beautiful. What else needs to be said about it? It runs spectacularly on my new 4K setup, which makes it a graphical treat. It reminds me fondly of Astal. Not sure how deep of a game it is.
41. Super Impossible Road (iOS): This frenetic racer was my first foray into using Apple Arcade.
42. Grindstone (iOS): Another Apple Arcade item– I was searching for some decent puzzle games and this has an interesting angle.
43. Patterned (iOS): Apple Arcade game that didn’t really make a good impression on me. Manually pattern-matching 2-dimensional image blocks turned out to be not my cup of tea.
44. Word Laces (iOS): An Apple Arcade title that has a tiny amount of educational value.
45. Tint (iOS): This is the point when I got a little bored of the Apple Arcade offerings.
46. Rise To Ruins: This is another of those games that I really, really want to like and that I keep on trying repeatedly, but it simply never clicks for me. It reminds me of trying to jump into a complicated software programming IDE and I just can’t make heads or tails of the myriad tools laid before me.
47. Devil May Cry (From the HD Collection on Steam): This is my first exposure to the franchise. The game won’t let me use my keyboard’s volume control buttons in game, which is weird. Also, its max resolution is 1080p, but I guess it’s upscaling to fill 4K since it doesn’t reset the monitor settings, which I appreciate. I suppose there is only so much “HD remastering” you can do for a game like this. I’m just glad that it is widescreen since some of the earlier screens in the game implied a 4:3 aspect ratio. There is something distinctly Resident Evil-ish about the game, which makes sense since it’s my understanding that this was a revamp of an abortive attempt at producing Resident Evil 4. Frustratingly, my internet was down while I played this game. Even though the game still played fine, it still annoys me slightly that I didn’t get “credit” in Steam’s time tracking for the hour or so that I put into it.
48. Mark of the Ninja Remastered: This game was a key title that made me want to upgrade to 4K last year. Towards the end of the year, I realized that I hadn’t touched this 4K Remastered upgrade yet.
49. Banished: I’ve had this for awhile but finally got around to playing it near the end of the year. Unfortunately, I got bored about 3 minutes into the tutorial. I appreciated that it had UI scaling for 4K. However, it didn’t seem to work everywhere. I.e., some menus were upscaled, but the in-game control icons and tooltips remained tiny.
50. Phantom Doctrine: Yet another turn-based strategy game. I keep buying these in the hope that one of them will grab me in the same way that XCOM did. This one is a cold war, stealth-themed affair which is a setting that I tend to enjoy. I can’t help but notice that all of these turn-based strategy games feel like re-skins of XCOM (I can’t wait to learn that there are earlier examples of the same type of interface), but this is a good deal more complicated than XCOM, based on my cursory gameplay. Still, the commonalities of the different games’ interfaces make me wonder if there is a Unity template.
51. Planet X3 (MS-DOS): This is a full DOS game created in 2018 by YouTuber The 8-Bit Guy. I supported the effort via Kickstarter and the game came out on Christmas Eve 2018. I figured I should give it a whirl some time during this calendar year.

Resolution for next year: play less Billions! I’ve also gotten a good start with MobyGames contributions. I’m hoping this will be the year that I finally learn to properly upload items to The Internet Archive. I’m finally going through storage boxes, trying to organize a lot of random optical discs that I’ve accumulated over the years.